


^IMRLEYR WQNER^ 





Class B 1^ I ?. . i 






COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



A Valid Religion 
for the Times 



A Study of the Central Truths of 
Spiritual Religion, 

BY 

PARLEY P. WOMER, 

Author of "The Relation of Healing to Law. 

With a Foreword by 
WASHINGTON GLADDEN. 




% 



New York: 
BROADWAY PUBLISHING COMPANY. 



1910. 






Copyright, iQio, 

BY 

Broadway Publishing Company, 
83s Broadway, N. Y. 



©C(.A281680 



In memory of a conversation that has had 
many happy issues both for ourselves 
and for others ^ this book is respect- 
fully dedicated to 
Dr. C. Eugene Riggs, Mrs. Riggs, 
and 
Mr. Henry E. Smith. 



PREFACE. 

The searching criticism to which all Christian 
teaching has been subjected in recent years was 
sorely needed in the interest of a purer and more 
rational faith. Now that its work in the main is 
accomplished, and its intensity has begun to 
abate we are confronted with the task of dealing 
properly with the message of truth that is left. 
This must be gathered up and restated in terms 
of our daily life and need. Many worthy at- 
tempts in this direction have been made, but these 
for the most part are beyond the reach of the 
busy, practical people who in nearly every com- 
munity comprise the vast majority of those who 
follow Christ. Busied with a thousand duties 
and demands of daily life there are many who 
have neither the time nor the equipment to follow 
the processes by which the trained thinker ob- 
tains his results, and yet they are profoundly in- 
terested in those results. They are asking what 
of the evangel has withstood the searching tests 
that have been applied. 

It is the standpoint of these that I have had in 
mind in the preparation of these ^ages rather 
I 



II PREFACE 

than that of the scholar or the philosopher. It 
has not occurred to me that the presentation 
herein made has anything especially new or origi- 
nal about it, because in fact I have laid a great 
many writers under tribute, but it represents a 
point of view that has brought immeasurable 
satisfaction and uplift to myself and I am not 
without hope that it may help in some small way 
to meet the general need. 

I am very greatly indebted to Dr. Gladden for 
so kindly taking the time out of his busy life to 
look over the manuscript, and to contribute a 
foreword. A still greater debt, however, that I 
owe him, and one that I would acknowledge with 
deep gratitude is the inspiration that I have 
drawn from his published writings, and which 
more than any other influence has helped to 
clarify my own ideas and enabled me to grasp in 
some measure the fundamental truths of spiritual 
religion. 

PARLEY P. WOMER. 

Park Congregational Church, 
St. Paul, Minn, 



FOREWORD 

I have read, more hastily than I wished 
to read, the chapters of this little hook, and 
have found myself gladly assenting, all the 
way, to the truth here set forth. The spirit 
of the hook is that of sweet reasonableness; 
it is not a polemic; it is simply and calmly 
affirmative; it assumes that the truth is its 
own best evidence, and that it only needs to 
he distinctly spoken. 

In every chapter we find evidence that the 
author has been reading widely and judi- 
ciously, that he understands what he has 
read, and that he has verified, by his own 
insight and experience the truth he is trying 
to teach. The realities of the spiritual life 
are approached in unconventional ways, hui 
we are helped to see that they are realities. 
How carefully, in the first chapter, are the 
discriminations drawn between the counter- 



n FOREWORD 

feit and the real spirituaUmindedness ; and 
how plain is it made to appear that that 
rather formidable phrase describes an expe- 
rience which is as simple and natural as de^- 
light in a landscape or the love of little chil- 
dren! 

It is pleasant to believe, as I do most 
heartily believe, that the type of teaching of 
which this book is a good example is be- 
coming increasingly prevalent among the 
younger ministers of the American pulpit. 
Such theological teachers as Henry Churchill 
King and William Newton Clark and 
George B. Stevens and William Adams 
Brown and George Hodges — to name but a 
few out of many — have been putting their 
own large, free, constructive spirit into the 
students whom they have been sending forth 
and we are beginning to reap the fruits of 
their labors. The output of our theological 
seminaries has been somewhat reduced, of 
late, numerically ; but the quality has been 
improving. 

The author of this little book has proved 



FOREWORD III 

himself to he a capable and inspiring leader 
of men. First in a strong church in Central 
New Yorkj and now in one of the important 
churches of the North-western metropolis, he 
has won a cordial hearing and a faithful fol- 
lowing. These pages should make him 
known to a larger audience. They will easily 
believe that he is a man of kindly temper, of 
wide sympathy, of independent judgment 
and of clear and high purpose. 

WASHINGTON GLADDEN. 
Columbus, March 75, igio. 



CONTENTS. 



Chapter 
I 


The Spiritual Mind .... 


Page 
I 


II 


Spiritual Receptivity 


. 13 


III 


The Spiritual Domination of Jesus , 


. 25 


IV 


The Moral Demand of Jesus . 


. Z7 


V 


The Spiritual Value of Morals 


. 49 


VI 


The Authority of Conscience . 


. 61 


VII 


The Ministry of the Bible 


. 75 


VIII 


The Prayer Instinct 


. 87 


IX 


The Influence of Temperament 


. lOI 


X 


The Power of a Positive Ideal 


. "5 


XI 


The Need of a True Estimate of Val 


ues 129 


XII 


The Sense of Moral Debt 


. 143 


XIII 


The Sympathy That Perfects Life . 


. 155 


XIV 


The Fellowship of Sympathy and of I 
ward Striving 


Jp- 
. 167 



To he carnally minded is death, but to he spirit- 
ually minded is life and peace. — Paul. 

Where there is no vision the people perish. — • 
Proverbs. 

We believe that the Spirit breaths upon every 
heart of mem, and that each receives according 
to his capacity. The spirit broods over the chaos 
of the densest and most confused souls. Conse- 
quently every man has in him the roots and rudi- 
ments of these Divine gifts. And the one su- 
preme business of his education is to evoke and 
develop these gifts, — Bishop Charles D. Wil- 
liams. 



A VALID RELIGION FOR 
THE TIMES. 

CHAPTER I. 

THE SPIRITUAL MIND, 

The statement of the New Testament that to 
be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually 
minded is life and peace, is one of those affirma- 
tives which burn themselves indelibly into the 
consciousness and when once heard can never 
afterwards be forgotten. We feel instinctively 
that a great distinction has been struck. **To be 
carnally minded." "To be spiritually minded." 
There is a measureless gulf that lies between the 
two; it is the gulf that lies between life and death, 
and between heaven and hell. 

Manifestly there is a great human reality con- 
tained here which it is of the utmost consequence 
to understand. To grasp the meaning of this 
reality for one's self and one's age and to get at 
precisely the set and attitude of the soul that the 
Apostle's words imply is a task that may well 
I 



2 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

engage our best thought and effort through the 
years, for the solution of the world^s riddle, the 
explanation of life's sorrow and loss, and the se- 
cret of life's strength and victory are to be found 
here. 

Men sometimes shrink from the investigation 
of these deeper realities of the soul out of fear 
that they will be disturbed, and come into ques- 
tionings and uncertainties which it is easier and 
pleasanter to avoid. There is need to reflect 
that disturbance may sometimes be God's way 
and, therefore, the only way of rescuing the soul 
from an attitude toward the spiritual order that 
is essentially death, and of bringing an attitude 
that is life and peace. In the parable of Jesus, 
the woman who had lost a coin, a precious heir- 
loom, is represented as lighting a candle and 
sweeping the house and searching diligently 
until she found it. In this Eastern house the 
sweeping consisted in tearing up the rushes 
which covered the clay floor, and in gathering 
together and sifting the dust that lay beneath. 
Thus the treasure of spiritual life may be ob- 
scured by the false conceptions and standards 
which exist; and there must be disturbance, the 
mind must come into questionings, and the con- 
science must be aroused in order that the treas- 
ure that is lost may be found. Men who are 



THE SPIRITUAL MIND 3 

fearful of every new truth that is proposed, as if 
the worst thing that could happen was some 
fresh outlook of the mind, and who scarcely 
dare to think lest they be disturbed, have need 
to be reminded that inertia of soul is not rest, 
satiety is not content, and stagnation is not peace. 
To get at the truth of this subject for our 
own time we have at the outset to work through 
and to set aside the strange and morbid concep- 
tions of the spiritual that from time to time have 
been held; but which, owing to the larger out- 
look that has been obtained, are beginning at 
last to disappear. There is to begin with, the 
conception that has identified it with the ascetic 
ideal. In every generation the ascetic, with his 
austere views of life and his rigid self-repression, 
has appeared. Under this influence the arts and 
sciences have been at times tabooed, all the in- 
terests of ordinary Ufe have been set down as 
godless secularities, religious worship, medita- 
tion, psalm singing, and supplication have been 
regarded as the only really spiritual pursuits. It 
is doubtless true that the protest of asceticism 
has been to some extent a restraining influence 
in society, and has helped to provoke a more 
spiritual temper in men at large, but its prevailing 
tendency has ever been to caricature the spiritual 
life and to make it repellent to the thinking mind. 



.4 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

It is said that Erasmus, the famous scholar of the 
Reformation period, once declared that there 
were those in his time who thought themselves 
spiritual because they did not wash themselves, 
and who regarded it as a peculiar mark of sanc- 
tity that they could not read. That was merely 
his way of pouring ridicule upon the idea that 
the spiritual life consists in the suppression of 
certain powers and faculties of our God-given 
nature, and in the shutting of ourselves out from 
certain large spheres of human thought and life. 
There, too, is the conception of the spiritual 
mind that has identified it with a certain per- 
suasion, or with great devoutness in worship, and 
this while permitting the most amazing license 
of conduct. A conspicuous example of this tem- 
per is the case of Cellini, a sixteenth century art- 
ist of note, concerning whom it is said that his 
favorite pastime was reading the New Testament, 
that he was especially fond of Paul's Epistles,' 
and was able to comment upon the Evangelists 
with angelic fervor, and arising from his devo- 
tions he would turn with equal ardor to his 
amours and murders. There is also the case of 
Charles IX. of France, who on Black Bartholo- 
meu's Day is reported to have spent nine hours 
m prayer, iand going from the place of worship 
lie gave the order that issued in the most atro- 



THE SPIRITUAL MIND 5 

cious massacre of history. To these may be 
added the case of a famous churchman, who is 
declared by one writer to have been "Mean, cruel, 
avaricious, and dishonorable, but exceedingly re- 
ligious, confidently believing that his footsteps 
were guarded by the blessed angels."* This is 
the conception of the spiritual in character that 
identifies it with a certain persuasion, with ec- 
stasy of feeling, or with great devoutness of wor- 
ship, while permitting the most amazing laxity in 
the ordinary round of conduct. 

There is finally the interpretation that has con- 
fused the spiritual in character with certain 
morbid states. It is said, for example, of a great 
historic figure noted for his saintliness, that every 
time he ate a meal he was accustomed to engage 
in a painful self-examination, and to ask him- 
self whether he was eating to sustain life or 
whether it was because he was fond of eating, 
and if his scrutiny seemed to show that he was 
eating for any other reason than to live, he was 
cast down in spirit, his soul was filled with sor- 
row, and he would stigmatize himself as carnal. 
Not a few have gained the reputation of being 
spiritual simply upon the strength of their emo- 
tional qualities, or from their ability, as some one 
has declared, "to put tears into their voice." At 

*Dr, Washington Gladden. 



6 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

times even the outward appearance, a pose of 
the features, a pair of dreamy eyes, or a "nasal 
twang," has been sufficient ground for the repu- 
tation of great spirituaUty. 

The trouble seems to be that the reality in- 
volved in this Pauline expression is something 
infinitely greater than has been realized. It is 
something that includes the whole of life and not 
simply a part ; that embraces all the faculties and 
powers and not merely a particular set of them; 
that covers the whole of man's experience and not 
simply a segment. Spirituality is normality. 
Holiness is wholeness. Saintliness is healthiness. 
Spiritual mindedness is wholesome mindedness. 
"Not suppression, but fruition," as some one has 
put it, is the true ideal. To be able to see God 
in every part of his world, in every phase of ex- 
perience, in every call of duty, in every sphere 
of action, in every cry of human need, and to 
respond with the whole nature to every thrill of 
the Divine, to let every faculty effulge touched 
with celestial fire, and nothing less than that is 
what is really meant by this Pauline conception of 
the spiritual mind. 

"To be spiritual," says a truly noble writer, "is 
to be able to see God in the best of everything, 
in a sunset touch, in a sonata of Beethoven, in a 
painting of Murillo, in the movements of con- 



THE SPIRITUAL MIND 7 

science, in the progress of history, in the laughter 
of Httle children, in the facts of one's own experi- 
ence, in the questionings of one's own heart, in 
the higher aspirations of one's own soul, and to 
be able to feel that the best of everything is God.' 
It is to be able to say with the poet— 

"Are not these, O Soul, the vision of Him who 

reigns? 
Is not the vision He, tho' He be not that which 

He seems? 
Dreams are true while they last, and do we not 

live in dreams? 

* * * * 
Dark is the world to Thee; thyself art the reason 

why; 
For is He not all hut thou, that hath power to 
feel 7 am I?' 

* * * * 

And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of 

mxin cannot see, 
But if we could see and hear, this Vision--were 
it not Hef'^ 

Here, for example, is the prophet Jeremiah 
walking forth in the early Spring, brooding sadly 
upon the spiritual deadness of his people, and 

♦Alfred Tennyson, 



8 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

seeing it reflected in all the barrenness of nature, 
but catching sight of an olive tree all covered 
with green shoots, his faith and confidence are 
instantly revived. He sees in the Hfe of the 
olive the pledge and token of the presence of a 
Divine something, and he is able to feel that 
underneath all the apparent deadness of nature 
and man there is a throbbing Infinite Hfe. Here 
is Kepler the astronomer, searching the heavens 
with his telescope; his heart filled with an un- 
utterable gladness and his eyes almost blinded 
with tears because he feels that he is reading 
God's thoughts after Him. Here is Thauma- 
turgus, the mathematician, talking of his sacred 
mathematics because he feels that in working 
out his problems and theorems he is following 
in the wake of an Infinite thinker. Here above 
all is the Master, gazing at the flowers, the birds, 
the ploughed fields, the sheep grazing on the 
hillside, the fishermen casting their nets, the 
business man disposing of his wares, the farmer 
sowing his seed^ the judge administering justice, 
and seeing and feeling in it all a Divine presence 
that fills his heart with joy and gives to him the 
sense of everlastingness. That surely, in part at 
least^ is what the New Testament writer means 
when he says that "To be spiritually minded is 
life and peace." 



THE SPIRITUAL MIND g 

It may be said, therefore, that to be spiritually 
minded is not simply to have a certain persua- 
sion, nor to hold a certain doctrine, nor to belong 
to a certain communion, nor to experience a cer- 
tain emotion. We can best think of it, perhaps, 
as an attitude and outlook of the soul. Just as it 
is possible for a dwelling to face the north or 
to face the south, and just as it is possible for 
it to face a beautiful, open, and sunny street, or 
to face a dark and sunless alley, so it is possible 
for the soul to face the light or to face the dark- 
ness, to face the eternal verities of God or to 
face the other way, and the worth of each man*s 
character is determined by the characteristic atti- 
tude and outlook of his soul. It is recorded of an 
early. Hebrew prophet that when an exile from 
his native city, he was accustomed to enter his 
chamber three times a day^ and his windows 
being open toward Jerusalem, he prayed and gave 
thanks to God. One of the greatest truths for 
every man to bear in mind is that it is possible 
for him to enter the inner sanctuary and to open 
the windows that look toward the Holy City of 
God, or it is possible for him to open the win- 
dows that look the other way. In the long- run 
the worth of each man's character is determined 
by the habitual outlook of his soul. 

We may well believe that to bring us into the 



10 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

right attitude and outlook of soul is heaven's 
chief concern. To this end Jesus came and ful- 
filled his mission, and endured the cross; and to 
this end the workings of Divine providence are 
directed, and all the discipline of Hfe is used. 
The world has sometimes been compared to a 
school and life to a course of training in a school. 
The figure, though familiar, is full of rich sug- 
gestion for every one who will take the trouble 
to consider what it means. The world is God's 
great school, and under God there are many 
teachers. Trouble is a teacher, misfortune is a 
teacher, all the hard things of life are teachers, 
and, little as we realize it, they all work together 
to bring us into the right attitude and outlook of 
soul. 

What is heaven's chief concern should be 
ours also. It is this that gives meaning to wor- 
ship and devotion, and makes them truly glorious. 
Worship is for the soul^ and grows out of the 
needs of the soul. It is to keep our life from 
becoming shut in and stifled by the cares of the 
world and the lust of other things which grow 
up about us, as trees grow up about one's home 
until they shut out the sun, and whatever way we 
look there are only shadows and obstruction. 
"Where there is no vision," says an ancient prov- 
grb, "the people perish." This defines precisely 



THE SPRITUAL MIND tt 

the meaning of our moments of withdrawal 
for reflection and devotion, and the need of pre- 
serving devotional habits in the midst of the stern 
and inexorable pressure of social ambitions and 
demands. We need at intervals to look out 
through the upper windows of the soul that we 
may see the whole of life in its large rela- 
tions, scope and end, that we may grasp the 
thoughts which only brush by us in the busier 
hours, and discern the distant persuasions of the 
holy character, "and through the opening vista 
send forth those quiet thoughts of consecration, 
which bring back across the spiritual sky the re- 
turning sunshine of God's illuminating love." 

"The most threatening peril of our age," says 
Francis Peabody, "is the possibility that among 
the engrossing interests of modern life there 
shall be no spiritual outlook, no open window of 
the mind, no Holy City of the soul, the shutters 
of life closed, the little things crowding out the 
great ones^ and the soul all unaware of the sun- 
shine and landscape which lie at its very door. 
That is the materialism from which any life might 
well pray to be set free, the shut in, self absorbed, 
unspiritualized, unhallowed life, the life without 
ideals, the windows toward Jerusalem closed and 
barred, and the man within so busy that he has 
no time to look out to any distant tower of sancti- 
fying hope." 



/ feel most strongly that man, in all that he 
does or can do which is beautiful, great, or good, 
is but the organ of something or someone higher 
than himself. This feeling is religion. 

So long as we are conscious of self we are 
limited, selfish, held in bondage. When we are 
in harmony with the universal order, when we 
vibrate in unison with God, self disappears. — 
Amiel^s Journal. 



12 



CHAPTER II. 

SPIRITUAL RECEPTIVITY. 

The progress of scientific thought is tending 
all the while to render more intelligible the secret 
of high character, of moral worth and power. 
We have come to realize that in the outer world 
a thousand wonderful forces are forever acting 
upon us. They knock, as it were^ at the door 
of human life and crave admission. Man creates 
none of these forces, he merely learns to use 
and to apply them. They were here centuries 
and ages before man's arrival; they were un- 
recognized by generation after generation, but 
one day the minds of a few people were opened to 
their significance; men began to appreciate how 
they might be used in the interests of human life, 
and that was called a discovery. With every such 
discovery man's progress on the physical side has 
taken a great leap forward. 

It is only stating this fact in another way to 
remark that all human progress on the lower 
and outer plane is a matter of receptivity. Of 
our own selves we can do nothing; it is only 



14 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

as we appropriate these outside forces that act 
upon us and learn to use them and to unite our- 
selves to them that we become "great with their 
greatness and mighty with their might." The dif- 
ference between life here in America, and life 
over in China, or in Africa is largely a difference 
in receptivity. The mechanical invention that is 
such a factor in our civilization simply registers 
our greater capacity for receptivity. And ap- 
parently there is no limit to the process. So far 
as we can see, it promises to continue indefinitely. 
There are still immense unused energies all about 
us waiting to be discovered. All the energy of 
the universe is at our disposal when our recep- 
tiveness is great enough and we are able to see it. 
All this on the lower plane is but a suggestion 
of what lies on the higher plane of spiritual 
character. When we know ourselves to be thus 
acted upon, on the lower side of life, it no longer 
seems incredible that the soul should have its 
visitations, and its mysterious intercourse with 
a divine force that acts upon it. With our pres- 
ent conceptions of light, heat, electricity, atoms, 
and ether, it is no longer incredible that there is 
"a light that shines through a subtler ether by 
which the mind sees truth, and a warmth that 
falls upon the soul which kindles love."* The 

* J. Brierley. 



SPIRITUAL RECEPTIVITY 15 

Christian doctrine of the Holy Spirit is but an- 
other statement of this wonderful truth. And the 
Christian admonition to receive the Holy Spirit 
is but another form of the plea for receptivity. 
In present day religious thought there is less 
said about the Holy Spirit but there is more 
said about the immanence of God. God is 
spirit and life. He is over all and in all. There 
is no part of the universe from which His activity 
is shut out. 

Perhaps only the rare souls who are character- 
ized with exceptional vision are conscious of the 
divine presence all the while, and are able to say 
with Madam Guyon: 

'7 love Thee Lord, hut all the love 

is Thine, 
For by thy life I live. 
I am as nothing and rejoice to be 
Emptied and lost and swallowed up 
in Thee." 

In our highest moods we all have glimpses and 
surmises of an Infinite presence, and of a spirit- 
ual power by which we live, breathe, walk, and 
achieve, 'and by which even we die. There are 
moments all through the years when we are con- 
scious of being thrilled and inspired. Some se- 



i6 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

cret sensitive fiber within is touched. In some 
mysterious way the heart is softened, gladdened, 
helped, comforted, and the thoughts reach out, 
and the soul looks up. It may be as one pursues 
his daily work, or reads a book that has com- 
manded his interest, or converses with a friend, 
or listens to a strain of music in the street, or 
worships in the sanctuary, or walks under the 
open sky, or sits by the lake side, or on the moun- 
tain top. A moment before and the heart was 
cold and dead, but in this moment of vision and 
inspiration it is warmed and softened. There 

''Comes to soul and sense 
The feeling that is evidence, 
That very near about us lies 
The realm of spiritual mysteries. 
With smile of trust and folded hands. 
The passive soul in waiting stands 
To feel, as Howers the sun and dew. 
The one true life its own renew." 

The New Testament conception clearly is that 
this Infinite energy that acts upon us from the 
unseen is personal and not mechanical, and that 
also our own experience tends to confirm. It 
takes a soul to touch a soul, and it requires love 
to evoke love. Sympathy cannot be created b^ 



SPIRITUAL RECEPTIVITY 17 

the action of blind force. The cause must be 
equal to the effect. To say that the Infinite 
energy which fills the universe is personal does 
not signify that it is limited, fitful, inconstant, 
or capricious. The personality of God must 
not be measured by our limitations. What we are 
coming slowly to realize is that the action of the 
unseen Spirit is as constant as the action of gravi- 
tation, and there is no favoritism. In the words 
of Jesus, "he maketh his sun to rise on the evil 
and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and 
the unjust." His grace descends upon the prince 
and the pauper and each may use the treasure as 
he will. 

The great truth, then, that needs to be realized 
is "that limitless power lies at each man's thresh- 
old waiting to be discovered and used,"* and 
our moral progress is conditioned by our capacity 
to receive. "Receive ye the Holy Spirit," said 
the great Teacher, and in the proportion that we 
receive we enter into true character and person- 
ality. "Christ's own great life is an illustration 
on the sublimest scale of this law of receptivity. 
He declared that of himself he could do nothing, 
but what he saw the Father do that he did also. 
In saying this he spoke not simply for himself, 
he was declaring for all people and for all time 

*J. Bricrley. 



i8 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

the law of spiritual character, and power." 
When there is receptivity there is enlargement 
of life, and steady upward progress. As one 
looks into the pages of human experience, they 
are found to contain numberless illustrations of 
this principle. A young girl sits one day in a 
quiet service in a village church and weeps, she 
scarcely knows why, but a strange softening in- 
fluence has met her, and she has yielded to it, and 
her emotion finds expression in tears of joy, and 
all the world knows the story of Elizabeth Fry. 
A wild seaman, coarse, rough, morally depraved 
and insignificant has an inspiration to a better 
life and he acts upon it. His name was John 
Newton and he it was who in later years com- 
posed the sweetest hymn in the English tongue. 
A foolish young debauchee, the object of a 
mother's tender prayers hears the summons to 
goodness, and obeys it. His name is Augustine 
and he it was who shaped the religious thought of 
Europe for fifteen centuries. Surely the secret 
of moral attainment and of high souled character 
is receptivity. All that we have or can have in a 
moral way is not so much a self creation as it is a 
receptivity. 

Side by side with our weakness and futility 
there lies an unmeasurable source of power that 
is th^ v^ry b^^rt of the Christian rev^btipp? and 



SPIRITUAL RECEPTIVITY tg 

it needs to be hammered and driven into the 
world's consciousness. The failure of men to 
realize character, if we understood it, is earth's 
darkest tragedy, and it is due in part to the fact 
that with all our Christian effort and activity, 
we have not yet succeeded in forcing home the 
truth that the secret of character is within the 
reach of everybody. Perhaps the difficulty is 
that the messengers themselves have only partly 
understood, and half believed the message. It 
seems not unlikely that the next great awakening 
will come when the Church itself has begun fully 
to believe. 

From all this rises the question how we may 
develop a larger spiritual capacity. There is 
no question greater than this, because it is along 
this path that we must travel to the highest. 
Here again we have the surest guidance in turn- 
ing to human experience. Paul's word to 
Agrippa, *T was not disobedient to the heavenly 
vision," throws a world of light upon the ques* 
tion as to the development of our spiritual capa- 
city. Rightly understood there was nothing in 
that experience of Paul as he traveled to Damas- 
cus that might not have been explained away as 
easily as we explain away our own experiences. 
He might have called it sunstroke, and perhaps it 
was that; dt least m its outer form. Or he might 



20 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

have called it hallucination, or epilepsy. It would 
not have been difficult to find an explanation for 
it that was very different from that which is 
given by the New Testament. But Paul himself 
knew that there was something else behind the 
experience. Whatever its outer form may have 
been, Paul knew that it held a divine visitation 
and he obeyed the summons. He knew and be- 
lieved because he had the will to believe, and the 
outcome was one of the most exalted characters 
of history. That Paul interpreted aright his ex- 
perience is proved by the outcome. 

The simple will to see, to believe, and to obey 
is perhaps the heart of the matter. The reveal- 
ing God is dependent upon the willingness of 
people. We are shut out by unwillingness from 
the divine benefits just as we are shut out in the 
same way from education, or enlightenment, or 
any other blessing. Warning impulses are disre- 
garded, heavenly strivings are unheeded, beatific 
visions are unseen and unfollowed, and the result 
is the forfeiture of life's highest treasure — the 
treasure of spiritual character. 

The bird in the heaven knows its appointed 
times, and we can easily picture to ourselves 
what would happen to the bird if the mystic call 
for its migration came unheeded. Lingering in 
the sunset when the air is full of summons for 



SPIRITUAL RECEPTIVITY 21 

departure would prove fatal. Any night the chill 
frost may descend, and the Autumn storm break 
over the reaped fields, and the foolish bird that 
has missed its opportunity be starved and frozen. 
The birds of the heaven know their appointed 
times; they await the mystic signal and obey it. 
This is a figure of human experience in dealing 
with the spiritual. The summons to the higher 
life comes, and it comes often. There are visita- 
tions, admonitions, warnings, and they are left 
unheeded. Can the result be otherwise than a 
loss to character? Does not this explain why so 
many go down when the hoar frost of tempta- 
tion falls, or the Autumn storm breaks upon the 
soul that is unprepared to withstand it? 

The simple will to see and to heed life's mystic 
signals, to sacrifice the lower for the higher, the 
immediate for the remote, the transient for the 
permanent, is the indispensable condition of re- 
ceptiveness. Traveling in this path of obedience 
to our best feelings and impulses, to our most 
earnest convictions of truth and God, and to 
our highest ideals of duty and right there is 
realized as the time goes on a sense of perpetual 
enlargement. "The surface is broadened upon 
which the Divine breath plays, the inner retina 
becomes more sensitive to the light from beyond 
the stars which fall upon it." 



52 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

To all this must be added humility. "Blessed 
are the poor in spirit, for they shall inherit the 
kingdom of heaven." The poor in spirit, are the 
teachable, the receptive, the people who want 
help, who are conscious of their need. They are 
open minded and impressionable. The most dif- 
ficult and impossible people are always the self- 
sufficient. The Pharisees thought they did not 
need anything, and so they could not get any- 
thing. "The most essential requirement to all 
spiritual attainment is that somehow we have 
been made open minded to the good."* "Hu- 
mility," as Henry Drummond once declared, 
"even when it happens through humiliation, is a 
blessing. Not to the Pharisee with his, T have 
need of nothing,' but to the publican who feels 
that he has need of everything, is the possession 
of the Kingdom of Christly character promised. 
The first condition of receiving the gift of God is 
to be free from the curse of conceit. The spirit- 
ually poor, that is the open and receptive and 
teachable, receive the great promise." 



♦Francis Peabody. 



Looking unto Jesus the author and perfecter 
of our faith.— T^E Epistle to the Hebrews. 

Christ moves among men, separate from 
them in character, yet one with them in sympathy 
and assistance. The purest of the pure, the 
strongest of the strong, the wisest of the wise, 
the greatest of the great, "the holiest among 
the mighty and the mightiest among the holy," 
He has become and must ever remain the regen- 
erator of the race. — Marvin. 



24 



CHAPTER III. 

THE SPIRITUAL DOMINATION OF JESUS. 

In the Gospel according to John it is reported 
of Jesus that he declared to his disciples that it 
was necessary for him to depart individually in 
order that the Spirit might come, and that if he 
should not depart the Spirit would not come. In 
view of this statement the question has been 
raised by a recent writer whether it may not be 
necessary to this same end for Jesus to pass away 
historically, and to be historically forgotten. "Is 
it inconceivable/' queries this writer "that a bil- 
lion years or so hence the human beings then 
alive will know as little about him and our spe- 
cific form of religion as we know about the re- 
ligion of the dwellers in Atlantis, or any other 
submerged land. Is it inconceivable that the very 
name of Christianity shall have passed away? 
And yet may not the world be more Christian 
then than now, have more faith, hope and love, 
be more sure of the fatherly God, of a brotherly 
man, of an eternal life and a purposeful world. 
May not the stream of spiritual life continue to 



26 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

deepen though the springs of Judah be forgot- 
ten?"* 

However it may be in the remote future in the 
present spiritual life and character have their 
greatest inspiration in the knowledge and under- 
standing of Jesus. He dominates the highest 
spiritual consciousness of the modern world, and 
to lose him from our thinking, if such a thing 
were possible would be "to lose the sun out of 
the heavens, and the soul out of the body, and 
what we should have left would be a spiritually 
frozen humanity, a dead symbol with the reality 
forever gone." 

For nearly two thousand years Jesus has been 
sovereignly conquering hearts, and extending his 
sway over the life of the race. Those of his own 
generation who caught a glimpse of the real 
treasure of life that he bears in himself, whether 
a learned Nicodemus, or a Canaanite peasant 
woman, were joined to him in a bond of love and 
confidence that nothing could break. The really 
remarkable thing about the New Testament is the 
consciousness of Jesus that pervades it. "The 
New Testament writers all set him in the same 
incomparable place, and all acknowledge to him 
the same immeasurable debt. They feel them- 
selves conquered by the spirit of Jesus, and con- 

♦Prof. G. B. Foster. 



SPIRITUAL DOMINATION OF JESUS 27 

fess him as their Master and Lord. He deter- 
mines, as no other does or can all their relations 
to God and to each other."* It is the place thus 
assigned to Christ which gives its religious unity 
to the New Testament and which has kept the 
Christian religion one all through history. In 
the words of another writer, "The New Testa- 
ment authors felt themselves to be in captivity to 
their Lord. They declared themselves to be his 
bond- servants. His empire over them is some- 
thing amazing and without a parallel in human 
history. And through them we behold an entire 
generation in the rapture of a great love. Their 
thoughts, their beliefs, their ideals, their hopes, 
and enthusiasms, their uplook into heaven, and 
their outlook upon the earth, are but different 
versions of the dominating soul of their Master 
and Lord/'t 

This influence of Jesus, so effective in his own 
time, has never ceased to be exerted, the spell 
that he cast upon the first generation of Christians 
has never since departed. It has been the source 
of a stream of spiritual life that has produced in 
the midst of all varieties of temperament, educa- 
tion and condition a definite inner quickening, a 
new refinement of feeling, and a new order of 
self-sacrificing love. The sound of his voice has 

* Prof. James Denny, f Dr. Geo. A. Gordon, 



28 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

never ceased to be heard. His ideals rise above 
us like stars in the night. His example has been 
an ineffaceable picture stamped upon the minds 
of all the leaders of the higher life. The spirit- 
ual teachers and prophets who have inspired our 
faith, hope, and love were themselves inspired 
by his message, and quickened by his spirit. The 
philosophers who have prepared the highways of 
thought along which the greatest thinkers travel 
have acknowledged, "that he stands alone the 
greatest of the sons of men." The philanthro- 
phists and reformers who have led the van of 
human service have found in him their greatest 
inspiration and hope. The musicians, artists and 
poets, whose creations of melody and beauty de- 
light the imagination of mankind, have worked 
under the spell of his personality, and been ex- 
alted by his truth. 

Indeed, the sign of his domination is every- 
where. "The whole sweep of our civilization,** 
says Dr. Gordon, "has been played upon, awak- 
ened, and informed, wrought over from its first 
estate, and, in spite of continuous and brutal 
resistance, charged with the power of Christ.** 
His thought of little children has placed a guar- 
dian angel beside each cradle. His regard for 
man, and his assertion of the worth of man*s 
nature has made human life, even in its lowliest 



SPIRITUAL DOMINATION OF JESUS 29 

forms, forever sacred. His conception of broth- 
erhood is liberating the bound. His thoughts 
of mercy are as medicine to hearts which are 
bruised. His triumph over death has removed 
its sting, and forever sanctified the tomb. His 
vision of the future has cleaved an opening in 
the skies through which multitudes are peering 
with eager and confident faces. Indeed, it may 
be said that our whole thought of God and man, 
and our entire working view of life are encom- 
passed, interpenetrated, and colored to a far 
greater extent than is ordinarily reahzed by the 
influence of Jesus. 

The secret of this immense spiritual influence 
and domination of Jesus unquestionably goes 
back to his personality. But the problem here is 
to account for his personality in terms that will 
satisfy the demands of the thinking mind. There 
is a marked tendency at the present time to ex- 
plain the transcendence and power of Jesus 
wholly upon the basis of his character. But 
very clearly this tendency ignores the fact that 
his character must be the character of some one. 
As one writer puts it, "he was not merely an 
exalted ethical habit, but a being to whom that 
exalted ethical habit belongs."* It is true "that a 
perfect life is not a trifling phenomenon in human 

*Dr. Geo. A. Gordon. 



30 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

history; that a purity like his could not come 
into our world without purifying; that such a 
life could not fail to reveal to men their sins, nor 
to honor and exalt the divine holiness, and to 
show that the sinner cannot be blessed in his sins, 
and that it could not fail to assert, magnify and 
vindicate the divine holiness, not alone or mainly 
by any one thing it does, but chiefly by what it 
is/'* Still the fact must not be lost sight of that 
the moral perfection of Jesus was that of a per- 
sonality, that beyond his perfection and deter- 
mining it was his personality. 

Happily with our present conception of God 
and man it is possible for us to believe in an out- 
shining of God through the personality of Jesus 
without resort to the naive and historically in- 
credible idea of a virgin birth, upon which ortho- 
dox teaching has hitherto based its doctrine of 
an incarnation, but which modern scholarship 
has clearly shown to be a later tradition that 
somehow became incorporated into the gospel 
records. So clumsily indeed have these birth 
stories of Matthew and Luke's gospels been com- 
piled that the genealogies which have been at- 
tached to them actually derive the royal descent 
of Jesus through Joseph. How, it must be asked, 
could this be, if, as these birth narratives assert, 

* Prof. Geo. B. Stevens. 



SPIRITUAL DOMINATION OF JESUS 31 

Joseph was not his father. Nor Is it necessary 
in accounting for the personality of Jesus to draw 
such a distinction between his nature and that of 
ordinary men as to make his example and char- 
acter meaningless for ourselves. 

Perhaps the first and most important thing 
to be noticed here is the new conception of ordi- 
nary human personality that man is coming to 
hold. The most thoughtful people everywhere are 
beginning to think that man himself is an organ 
of the Eternal consciousness ; that his nature, as 
Amiel puts it, "is grounded on something greater 
than itself"; that, in the words of Fichte, "our 
minds are related to the Infinite mind as the 
branches are related to the tree," and consequently 
that we are able to think and reason, because of 
an Infinite reason at the basis of our thoughts; 
that we are able to approve or to condemn be- 
cause of an eternal righteousness mysteriously 
linked to our own; that behind the ideas and 
and consciousness which seems so clear to us, 
there is the Infinite ground of our being, "the 
un-incarnated part of us,"* that is more and more 
filling us and realizing himself through us. 

With this conception of ordinary human nature 
in mind, the teaching that Christianity puts in the 
forefront, that God was manifest in Jesus Christ, 

♦ Sir Oliver Lodge. 



32 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

that he was the "impress" or "image of God," 
"the uttered wisdom or outshining of the divine 
majesty," is made to appear more credible and 
intelligible. "In the nature of Christ," says Mr. 
Brierley, "humanity enlarged its borders to take 
in divinity. His spirit perfectly appropriating 
the divine spirit became one with it, and there 
was mirrored in his consciousness such an image 
of God and of the unseen world, that he becomes 
our divinest symbol," our everlasting leader, the 
freely elected master of our souls. 

"O Lord and Master of us all, 
Whafere our name or sign, 
We own thy sway, we hear thy call. 
We test our lives by thine!* 

Nor is the manifestation of God in the life of 
Jesus to be regarded as any the less wonderful 
because it takes place under strictly human con- 
ditions. Indeed, it must be evident to even the 
most casual thinker that to be comprehensible, 
or to be of any value to us it could take place 
under no other conditions. The Apostle Paul, 
whose doctrine of Jesus is the loftiest, from 
whom above all others the Church has taken its 
conception of Jesus as the Divine Redeemer and 
Saviour, begins his greatest epistle, that to the 



SPIRITUAL DOMINATION OF JESUS 33 

Romans, with the affirmation that "J^sus Christ 
our Lord was made of the seed of David accord- 
ing to the flesh," and the reputed utterance of 
Peter in the opening chapters of the Acts, which 
in the judgment of most critics constitutes a very 
early Christian tradition, specifically declares 
that "J^sus was a man approved of God among 
you," whom God hath raised up, having loosed 
the pains of death." The truth that becomes 
more evident as we study the life depicted in the 
Gospel records is that Jesus "entering into all 
human conditions, at every point transcends 
them," and by doing so, he lifts the experiences 
and possibilities of living to a higher plane than 
human vision has ever conceived before. "In the 
spiritual evolution of man," says Mr. Brierley, 
"we do not know where man ends and God begins. 
But as we study the records of Jesus in his life 
and death, and in the power of his resurrection, 
what we do know is that here God and man are 
manifestly one." 

In view of the fact that Jesus is the transcen- 
ding personality, that, in the words of Schleir- 
macher, he is the completion of the creation of 
human nature, and therefore the highest radia- 
tion of the hoHness and love and presence of 
God, it seems both probable and certain that the 
spiritual development of the race in the future, 



34 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

instead of passing beyond the person of Jesus 
will be in the direction of a more adequate knowl- 
edge of him, and that this growing consciousness 
of Jesus and what he represents, will be in the fu- 
ture as it has been in the past the most potent 
factor of that development. 

It is everywhere the personal touch that up- 
lifts and heals. There is no force in things to 
uplift the sunken spirit. Spiritual needs can be 
met only by spiritual means. In Goethe's auto- 
biography the great German indicates for us the 
various stages of his moral development, and he 
shows how at this point or that he came into 
contact with some strong and dominating per- 
sonality, whose influence remained with him 
throughout the years. He declared that his edu- 
cation was the sum of the effects that were pro- 
duced by this personal contact. The fundamen- 
tal Christian idea clearly is that it is by the knowl- 
edge, and touch of this strong and commanding 
soul that humanity is to be lifted up and re- 
deemed, that we are to be filled with hunger for 
righteousness, with passion for truth, that our 
experience is to be deepened and enriched, and 
our characters made strong and resplendent with 
the throb of a new divine life. 

The greatest need of our times as well as of 
our individual lives is a better knowledge and a 



SPIRITUAL DOMINATION OF JESUS 35 

deeper consciousness of this pure and kingly 
soul. We need to live in his presence until we 
can say with the Apostle Paul, "He lives in me ;" 
to study the record of his life until his image 
shines before the inward vision, and his char- 
acter becomes more real to us than that of any 
earthly friend, and his word sounds in our ears 
with the power of a living voice. True spiritual 
development, is learning to love with his love, to 
sorrow with his grief, and to serve with his spirit 
of sacrifice. It is learning to do as he did, to go 
where he went in the interests of human need, 
and to learn to bear the cross of sacrifice in our 
own hearts. 



Not every one who saith unto me Lord, Lord, 
shall enter into the kingdom of Heaven; but he 
that doeth the will of my Father in Heaven. — 
Jesus. 

The value of a truly great man consists in his 
increasing the value of all mankind. It is here 
that the highest significance of truly great men 
lies. But Jesus Christ was the first to bring the 
value of every human soul to light. And zvhat 
he did no one can any more undo. — Harnack. 



36 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE MORAL DEMAND OF JESUS. 

There was nothing of which Jesus spoke so 
constantly as of simple goodness. Doing the 
will of God was a favorite expression with him; 
it runs through all his teaching. He was con- 
scious of having realized for himself the life of 
perfect union with God. UnHke other men he 
had no sense of estrangement between himself 
and the Father ; his was the life of true and loyal 
sonship. He felt absolutely sure of God and 
was perfectly at home in God's world. He was 
haunted by no fear, perplexed by no doubt, dis- 
quieted by no misgiving, weakened by no dis- 
cord. The Divine requirements were never felt 
by him to be a burden. The will of God was 
both his law and his delight. "Not my will but 
thine be done," is the word that best defines and 
interprets his inner life. 

Manifestly Jesus sought supremely to lead 
men into the mystery of his own experi- 
ence. It was not merely personal adoration 
that he craved, but that his consciousness of 
Z1 



33 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

God, and his spirit of filial obedience to the will 
of God might be realized and reproduced in his 
disciples. "Not every one," he insistently urged 
upon them, "who saith upon me Lord, Lord, 
shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he 
that doeth the will of my Father in heaven." It 
is clear enough that it was not for the purpose of 
exempting men from going to the Father that 
Jesus offered himself, but to lead them to the 
Father, into a true knowledge of His will, and 
into the spirit of obedience to His will. "It is 
not as a secondary God that we are to think of 
Jesus, more human and more accessible to our 
prayers and complaints,"* and it is not by way of 
relieving ourselves from going to the Father that 
we are to address him. We are to go to him and 
abide in him precisely that we may find the 
Father. We are to abide in him that his con- 
sciousness may become our own, that his spirit 
m.ay become our spirit, and that God may dwell 
immediately in us as He dwelt in him. 

As the word, "Not my will but thine be done," 
m.ay be regarded as the keynote of his experience, 
so the word, "For their sakes I sanctify myself 
that they themselves also may be sanctified in 
truth," may be regarded as the keynote of his 
mission and his work. The truth in which his 

* August Sabatier. 



THE MORAL DEMAND OF JESUS 39 

disciples are to live is manifestly the same truth 
as that in which he lived, the truth of a Godlike 
devotion, obedience, service and self-giving. That 
this is the way the author of the record under- 
stood such teaching is clearly shown by the fact 
that elsewhere he wrote, "Hereby know we love 
because he laid down his life for us, and we 
ought to lay down our lives for the brethren." 
He is the pattern life; ours must be run in the 
same mould. 

It is true that Jesus said to his disciples, "Come 
unto me, and ye shall find rest unto your souls," 
"follow me," "love me," "believe in me," "I 
live in the Father and the Father in me," but in 
the light of so much positive teaching to the con- 
trary such utterances can scarcely be regarded 
as an appeal for personal adoration and worship. 
It was thus rather that he invited men into the 
mystery of his own inner life and experience, 
else how shall the fact be explained that he 
taught his disciples to pray as he did, and to put 
themselves into the same filial relation to God as 
he did, saying to Him, "Our Father"; or that 
in speaking to his disciples of God he more 
often says your Father, or our Father, than my 
Father; or that he repeatedly refers to the dis- 
ciples as the "children of the Father." Thus he 
reveals his desire to give to all the weary and the 



40 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

burdened the wealth of Hfe which he had within 
himself, to share with them the riches of his 
own inner life, to help them to experience what 
he experienced, and to teach them to obey as 
he obeyed and to love as he loved, without con- 
dition or reserve. 

The history of Christianity undeniably reveals, 
at least at many points, a marked and surprising 
failure to appreciate the fundamental aim and 
purpose of Jesus. The tendency has ever mani- 
fested itself among his disciples to allow their 
devotion to him to take the form of emotional 
fervor, ecstatic tribute, and pious adulation 
rather than to recognize him as a moral and 
spiritual leader to be followed. Adoration for 
the person of Jesus has been substituted for loy- 
alty to his spirit in doing the will of God. Even 
among the disciples of his own time Jesus recog- 
nized this tendency, and in words that even a 
child can understand he declared that he wanted 
to be followed and not merely to be worshipped. 
**Not every one who saith unto me Lord, Lord, 
but he that docth the will of my Father." "He 
that doth not take up his cross and follow me is 
not worthy of me." "He that findeth his life 
shall lose it, and he that loseth his life for my 
sake shall find it." His spirit of duty doing and 
of service, in other words, is the standard for all 



THE MORAL DEMAND OF JESUS 41 

his followers. The cross is a symbol of what 
others as well as himself must do and experience. 
In some real sense the Master's religious secret 
is to be possessed by the disciple, his experience 
is to be repeated in the disciple, and his life is 
to be lived over in the disciple's life. 

In spite of this teaching succeeding generations 
fell into the very misconception that Jesus had 
{foreseen, and that he tried to obviate. Before 
long Christianity became a worshipping of Jesus 
rather than a following him. Millions of people 
kept saying "Lord, Lord," but they did not the 
things that he said, and they failed to reproduce 
the spirit of his life. More and more the mind 
was carried from the historic Jesus to a defini- 
tion of his place in the Godhead, and to the kind 
of person it ought to be thought that he was, and 
terrible persecutions were instigated in order to 
enforce their arguments and to secure agreement 
in their speculations. Unquestionably, some- 
thing of the same temper and idea has been in- 
herited by the Christianity of the present day. To 
men of discernment it is as clear as the sunlight 
that upon the lips of many, the name of Christ 
is scarcely more than a name to be conjured 
with. There seems to be an impression in cer- 
tain quarters that to hold up one's hand in meet- 
ing, or to rise for prayers, or to say, "I believe" is 



42 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

a guarantee of salvation, and the essential, if not 
the only thing required to secure admission to 
the ''heavenly places." Such a spirit very clearly 
reduces the highest matter with which a hu- 
man soul can deal to the plane of sorcercy and 
jugglery. It substitutes for the high reason, 
and for the earnest and sustained spiritual effort 
that was taught by Jesus, a species of com- 
mercialism. It puts Christ in the attitude of say- 
ing, If you will call me "Lord, Lord," I will give 
you a house and lot in heaven. 

And this failure to realize that the supreme 
purpose and aim of Jesus was to introduce men 
into the intimacy of his own spiritual life, to 
the end that they might draw therefrom a faith 
and experience similar to his own, and become 
morally and spiritually like him, has wrought 
great loss to individual character, and greatly 
weakened the influence and power of Church life. 
It is not difficult to recall, with a moment's re- 
flection almost any number of persons who bear 
the Christian name, and whose opinions are of 
the most orthodox and approved type, but whose 
moral character, nevertheless, is open to suspi- 
cion, whose reputation for integrity is by no 
means enviable, or who are selfish, cramped, and 
unloving. We all know those who are fervent 
in their devotions and punctilious in going 



THE MORAL DEMAND OF, JESUS 43 

through with the motions of religion, but whose 
credit is far from good in the world of business, 
and whose word is not to be trusted; or those 
whose greed has led them to trample upon equity, 
justice, honor, and all the rights of their fellow 
men; or those who are treacherous backbiters of 
their brethren, or remorseless gossips, in whose 
mouth no man's reputation is safe. 

It is a pathetic fact that to a considerable ex- 
tent all through history, the adoration and wor- 
ship of Jesus have taken the place of obedience 
to his spirit, belief in a definition of his person 
has been substituted for devotion to his ideals, 
praising and describing him has been considered 
of greater importance than imitating and follow- 
ing him. When, as in the case of the early 
Quakers, or the Baptists of the seventeenth cen- 
tury, a few high souled persons have come for- 
ward to emphasize the moral significance of 
Jesus, and to summon their fellows to follow in 
the way of his truth and his life, they have been 
regarded with suspicion, treated with insult and 
injury, and held to be a menace to both the 
Church and society. It is of this temper and 
spirit that a distinguished Christian leader* re- 
marks, that it is as truly an idolatry as the adora- 
tion of the virgin and the saints. The word 

♦August Sabatier. 



44 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

"Jesusolatry" may not be an altogether happy 
one, but without doubt it represents a temper 
and attitude toward Jesus which are repugnant 
to the true ideals and aims that he embodied and 
that he gave his life to vindicate and establish. 

Notwithstanding the advance that has been 
made in recent years it is obvious to the careful 
observer that something of this attitude still sur- 
vives. The name of Christ is still defended in 
a spirit that is far from Christlike; his divinity 
is maintained in ways that are wholly undivine; 
this or that conception of the Bible is enforced 
in a manner that violates at every point the spirit 
of the Bible. There is still a marked and a 
widespread failure to understand that no one 
ever really believes in Jesus until the touch of the 
Master's goodness makes him beheve in the pos- 
sibility of goodness for himself; no one ever 
really believes in the cross of Jesus until he takes 
up his own cross and begins to bear the spirit of 
sacrifice in his own heart, and no one ever really 
believes in the divinity of Jesus until in the fel- 
lowship of that divine goodness he catches the 
vision of his own divinity, and the great word 
of the master becomes that of his own heart also, 
*'Be ye therefore perfect even as your Father in 
heaven is perfect.'* 

Nothing has been demonstrated more convinc- 



THE MORAL DEMAND OF JESUS 45 

ingly by the searching study of the New Testa- 
ment record than that belief in Jesus is not sim- 
ply the adoration of his person, or the consent 
of the intellect to a doctrine of him, either the 
doctrine of his divinity of any other, but the re- 
sponse of all that is deepest in ourselves to the 
appeal of his spirit and life. It is to enter into 
the intimacy of his character^ to allow his 
thought to influence us, his manner of life to in- 
spire us^ his spirit to control us, and to make 
with him the venture of obedience to the will of 
the Highest. 

"He that believeth/' said the Master to his 
disciples, "shall be saved. And he that believeth 
not shall be condemned." Such words may 
easily be construed in the interest of a narrow 
and shallow dogmatism, but it is becoming more 
evident all the while that the word belief on the 
lips of Jesus stood for a moral quality. It stood 
essentially for moral faithfulness, and unbelief 
stood for faithlessness. It is here that we come 
upon the cardinal error of much of our Chris- 
tianity. Belief is supposed to be an assent to a 
doctrine, whereas it is willingness to act upon 
our moral and spiritual intuitions. We are easily 
persuaded to make the venture of thought, but 
not the venture of conduct. "We readily believe 



46 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

that we have a soul, but it is difficult to persuade 
us to live as though we were a soul." 

Belief is ever a saving force in human life 
when it carries with it the conscience, heart and 
will as well as the intellect. He that believes in 
high things is saved from the tyranny of low 
things ; he that believes in the spiritual and eter- 
nal is saved from the tyranny of the material 
and temporal, and he that believes in Jesus in the 
sense of responding to the revelation that he 
brought, appropriating his ideals, and reproduc- 
ing his spirit shall be saved. He that believeth 
not shall be condemned. He condemns himself 
at the bar of his own higher nature. He con- 
demns himself to a low, cramped, starved, poor, 
and perhaps a wicked Hfe, and that is moral faith- 
lessness. 

"Lord I believe, help thou mine unbelief." That 
is a prayer for moral earnestness and fidelity. 
If the Church at large could realize that the be- 
lief that Christ enjoins^ and that is the watch- 
word of Christianity, is not merely the worship 
of the man Jesus, or the consent of the mind to 
certain opinions about him, but the keying of the 
whole nature to the spirit of Jesus, and to his 
moral and spiritual consciousness, what a force 
it would become to lift the whole world to the 
plane of the Master's character ! Opinions that 



THE MORAL DEMAND OF JESUS 47 

command only the consent of the intellect, and 
emotions that find expression only in worship 
amount to very little. No man has a right to 
call himself a Christian merely because of these. 
The belief enjoined by the great Master makes 
its appeal to the whole nature. It is moral fidelity, 
and no man needs to be told when he has been 
morally faithless. "He that believeth shall 
be saved." The Church or the people who be- 
lieve shall be saved; they shall be saved to the 
moral beauty and earnestness of Jesus. He that 
believeth not shall be condemned. He shall con- 
demn himself to a starved and unworthy life, 
when he might have life above measure. 



"If any man willeth to do his will he shall 
know of the doctrine!' — Gospel of John. 

Any man who lives for the right has in him a 
germ of spiritual life, though he may not call it 
such, and though he may through ignorance miss 
many of the privileges of the sons of God. What 
he still needs is the revelation of God's loving 
Fatherhood and of the ability of Jesus to fulfill, 
that is to bring to its fulness, the law which he 
already acknowledges. — George Albert Coe. 



48 



CHAPTER V. 

THE SPIRITUAL VALUE OF MORALS. 

The representatives of religion have not in- 
frequently spoken in derogatory terms of morals. 
It is said that less than fifty years ago an emi- 
nent teacher of religion affirmed that moral men 
as a class, and by the very virtue of their moral- 
ity inflict the severest injury upon the cause of re- 
ligion, and that the more perfect the moralist the 
more fatal the influence. The statement repre- 
sents a point of view that until within the past 
few decades was very generally shared, and the 
term, "mere morality" still lingers in the speech 
of religious men. 

While it is true that this point of view is now 
to a great extent outgrown, it is very doubtful 
whether the religious Or spiritual value of the 
moral life has been made sufficiently clear to the 
average mind. "We have been accustomed to 
look at morals from the side of religion, saying 
truly that whoever is religious will be a doer of 
right as well; but far less often is the question 
raised whether doing right has an essentially re- 
49 



so A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

ligious quality within itself."* Goodness is com- 
monly represented as a necessary consequence 
of religion, but apparently the idea has not yet 
gripped the mind of the average man that good- 
ness is itself a religious fact, that every genuine 
determination to do right has a divine signifi- 
cance, that obedience to the moral sense is the 
door that opens into religious apprehension and 
faith, that the ''symbols of religion, are but the 
ciphers of which the key is found in the moral 
experience,'* and that the condition of under- 
standing religious truth is, as the teaching of 
Jesus plainly declares, to live the moral life. "If 
any man will to do his will he shall know of the 
doctrine." 

That the religious or spiritual value of the 
moral life has not yet been made clear is shown 
not only by the tendency of many religious people 
to speak with a patronizing air of the "merely 
moral man" and to carry the idea that religion 
requires something that lies outside of the moral 
life, something more than the command of mor- 
ality requires of him, but also by the tendency of 
many strictly moral people to disclaim religion 
and to deny themselves the stimulus of religious 
association and worship. There is to be found 
in nearly every community to-day, a very con- 

*]Prof. G, A. Coe. 



THE SPIRITUAL VALUE OF MORALS 51 

siderable number of people of high character, 
whose honesty, faithfulness, disinterestedness, 
truthfulness, and generosity can be depended 
upon, but who somehow fail to respond to any 
form of Church life_, or to be attracted by any 
religious creed; it may be that they fail even to 
have any very definite ideas about God, or to 
have any sense of what Christians call the wit- 
ness of the Spirit, and so they disown reHgion 
altogether. A man of this kind, such a man as 
we instinctively believe in as soon as we see him, 
once confided to the writer that a sense of God 
was utterly foreign to his experience, that what 
people mean when they speak of the Divine pres- 
ence, or the Divine nearness was wholly unintel- 
ligible to him, and he raised the query whether 
such a one could venture to associate himself 
with a religious body or to serve in the name of 
religion without hypocrisy. Manifestly what 
such persons need to realize, as well as those who 
place religion in contrast to morality, and speak 
disparagingly of the merely moral man, is that 
the moral sense itself is the supreme religious or 
spiritual fact, that true religion dwells with the 
moral sense, is bound up with it and grows out 
of it, and that somehow the sense of duty and 
the sense of God are one. 
It is true no doubt that there is a conventional 



S2 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

conduct and a decent conformity which are in- 
spired merely by prudential motives, for the sake 
of praise, reputation, or some personal advan- 
tage; but the idea that the moral sense when 
it exists independently of definite religious be- 
liefs, and fails to be attracted by prevailing forms 
of worship is always thus inspired is not accord- 
ing to fact. The truth is that the moral sense is 
fundamental to our nature, it is inherent in the 
rational constitution of the soul. Man did not 
originate it any more than his eyes have created 
the light or than his lungs have created the at- 
mosphere. Martineau is doubtless right in af- 
firming that whatever is most deep within us is 
"the reflection of God; that all our better loves 
and higher aspirations are the answering move- 
ments of our nature in harmonious obedience to 
his spirit; that whatever dawn of blessed sanc- 
tity, and awakening of purer perception opens 
in our consciousness, are the sweet touch of his 
morning light within the soul; that he befriends 
our moral efforts, encourages us to maintain 
our resolute fidelity and truth, accepts our co- 
operation with his designs against evil, and re- 
veals to us many things far too fair and deep 
for language to express." 

Every one who takes the word moral upon 
his lips realizes, if only in a dim and imperfect 



THE SPIRITUAL VALUE OF MORALS 53 

way that it stands for eternal values, and that 
not to be moral is to set ourselves against the 
will of the universe as well as against the higher 
law of our own nature. The intelligence may 
not always see truly, and it may not always pos- 
sess all the facts upon which to make up its 
judgment in each case as to what is true, but the 
pressure to follow the truth as far as we see it 
and to do the right as far as we understand it, 
is upon us all. **There is something akin to a 
mighty and universal gravitation upon us, bind- 
ing and urging us to do every righteous thing; 
yes, to be honest, faithful, brave, just, generous, 
men of faith and love. In so far as we ever re- 
sist the movement of this gravitation, this life 
force, welling up in us with its everlasting 
''ought," we feel a kind of pain, like a bodily 
ache betraying disease. There is satisfaction 
like no other satisfaction, whenever our souls 
give themselves to this invisible motion. "=*= 

The conclusion seems unavoidable that obedi- 
ence to the moral sense is an essentially religious 
act. If the sense of duty originates with man's 
Creator it must be that duty doing will lead at 
last to the apprehension, and knowledge of the 
Creator, that moral devotion in due time will 
open into religious discernment and faith. The 

* Charles E. Dole. 



54 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

sneer of "mere morality" can obscure only to 
unthinking minds the fact that moral integrity 
has an essentially religious quality within itself, 
that men who hold to strict honesty though they 
fail to recognize it as the mandate of God are 
nevertheless obeying the voice of God, and that 
men whose fidehty is beyond price, who do right 
because it is right, it may be in the face of risks, 
where others expect and desire conduct of a dif- 
ferent sort, although they have no very definite 
ideas about God^ and do not hold to any particu- 
lar religious creed, or associate themselves with 
any church, or incline to engage in any of the 
formal exercises of worship, are nevertheless 
fulfilling the spirit and end of religion, and they 
must be rated as religious men. 

There is perhaps no better statement of the 
religious or spiritual value of the moral life than 
the teachings of Jesus in. the Sermon on the 
Mount. The great teacher here speaks to the 
duty doers, to the meek, the merciful, the lovers 
of righteousness, the peace-makers, and the pure 
in heart. He commends with glowing words the 
fidelity of each, and he declares that there is a 
spiritual consequence and result that lie beyond, 
to which, although it may be unconsciously, our 
moral devotion is sure to lead. The duty doers 
come at last into spiritual apprehension, "they 



THE SPIRITUAL VALUE OF MORALS 55 

shall know of the doctrine." The poor in spirit 
inherit the kingdom of heaven. The pure in 
heart see God. The parables of Jesus declare 
the same great truth. *Tn each of these parables 
the way of life that leads through the valley of 
duty mounts at last to the height of faith." Con- 
science first acting as human is discovered at last 
to be divine. The prodigal outcast comes to 
himself and says, "I will arise and go to my 
father." He barkens to the mandate of con- 
science, and yields to the moral sense and there 
breaks upon him the vision of the waiting 
Father. 

"A larger life upon his own impinging, 
To which the etherial suhstcmce of his own. 
Seems hut gross cloud to make that visible. 
Touching to a sudden glory round the edge!' 

It has been very commonly assumed by reli- 
gious men that it is by the path of intellectual 
speculation, belief, and creed subscription that 
God is found; and it has required generation 
after generation of theological debate, and fierce 
word conflict to demonstrate that such is not the 
case. There have been many periods in the his- 
tory of religion when men staked everything 
upon their definitions, and those were the least 



56 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

vital periods. In the fourth and fifth centuries, 
for example, the creed was all in all. Gregory 
of Nyssa, a writer of the period, reveals the fact 
that people were so absorbed in the discussion 
of doctrinal riddles that they scarcely had 
time for anything besides, and never was there 
a time of greater license or degradation of 
character. Never was there a more frivolous or 
licentious people. No one to-day even thinks of 
turning to the fourth or fifth century for inspi- 
ration. It is the arid desert of Christian history. 
The truth is that mere speculation is utterly bar- 
ren of spiritual results, and mere creed subscrip- 
tion is powerless to awaken vision. It is moral 
obedience that brings insight and opens into reli- 
gious apprehension and faith. "The sentiment 
of virtue," said Emerson, "is the essence of all 
religion. While a man seeks good ends he is 
strong by the whole strength of nature. When 
he says, T ought' then he can worship and be 
enlarged by his worship. In the sublimest flights 
of the soul rectitude is never surmounted." 

But here a distinction of great importance 
must be made. There is a difference between a 
moral life and the mere conventional conduct 
and decent conformity which all too easily pass 
for morality. The sore need of many is a clear- 
ing up of their notion of what constitutes a 



THE SPIRITUAL VALUE OF MORALS 57 

moral life. The young man of the New Testa- 
ment who came to the Master professing- to have 
kept the commandments from his youth up is a 
case to the point. He was confident of his mor- 
ality, and yet the first word of Jesus revealed the 
fact that it was of the merely prudential and cal- 
culating sort^ He could not meet the test that 
was applied to him. When asked to sacrifice he 
went away sorrowfully. It was not by any 
means because he was moral that Jesus said to 
him, "One thing thou lackest." It was because 
he was not moral enough. 

Perhaps the great truth that needs to be 
grasped here is that the fundamental fact of the 
moral life is the recognition of a law that super- 
cedes mere inclination. "The really moral 
man is one who habitually and of principle pre- 
fers to do his duty. He is faithful not merely 
to the duties that he likes to do, or to those that 
are convenient for him, for one who stops here 
is still under the dominion of inclination. Every 
horse-thief, pickpocket, seducer of innocence 
does the duties he likes to do. The truly moral 
man, in a word, is one who surrenders his will 
to higher law." 

It is not meant that one must be perfect in 
conduct and character in order to be moral. It 
is true that morality consists in an honest aspira- 



58 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

tion and effort toward a standard rather than in 
a present reaHzation. The moral man may do 
wrong but he does not purpose to do it, and he 
does not choose to remain in it. He may see things 
through imperfect eyes, and thus he may regard 
as good many things that are bad, but beneath 
all confusions of understanding and lack of 
knowledge there is the purpose to do the right as 
far as he understands it, and to follow the truth 
as far as he sees the truth. The words of the 
Hebrew Psalmist, "I have purposed," declare the 
great determining factor of the moral life. 

To minimize morality in the name of religion, 
to relegate it to a place of secondary importance, 
and to regard it simply as a "by product of re- 
ligion," is to introduce confusion into religious 
teaching that cannot fail to bring loss. Let us 
realize that it is possible to worship God without 
naming Him, or without having any definite and 
formulated ideas about Him, and this is precisely 
what is done in every honest surrender of incli- 
nation to duty, and in all true obedience to the 
moral sense. "It should not be expected," says 
Prof. Herrmann, "that our God gives us orders 
like a policeman, but as the Father and Lord of 
Spirits." For that reason his command does not 
present itself as something foreign. It comes 
to us to constrain us in our innermost being. The 



THE SPIRITUAL VALUE OF MORALS 59 

natural conscience of every individual soul is 
God's own pure word, by which we know at 
once the law He loves^ and feel the demand of 
his wakeful eye. Declining to be judged from 
without He comes to us readily within; He 
bends to our sympathies; He meets us freely in 
the private lot; He haunts us with the thought 
of a purer and more perfect use of our life. He 
brings the sense of duty and responsibility. He 
awakens the imperative mood, and though we 
fail to recognize that it is God who thus utters 
Himself out of the depth of our being, moral in- 
tegrity spells obedience to God, and it is the door 
that opens at last into the true apprehension and 
knowledge of God. 



Let each man he fully assured in his own mind. 
Let iLs not therefore judge one another any more. 
But judge this rather that no man put a stum- 
bling block in his brother's way, or an occasion 
of falling. — Paul. 

Every man however good, has a yet better 
man within him. When the outer man is un- 
faithful to his deeper convictions the hidden man 
whispers a protest. The name of this whisperer 
in the soul is conscience. — Von Humbolt. 



60 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE AUTHORITY OF CONSCIENCE. 

A BEAUTIFUL incident concerning a humble 
Quaker and one that is particularly refreshing 
since it belongs to our own generation, has re- 
cently been given to the public by a well known 
English writer. This man, an inhabitant of Aus- 
tralia and a lowly cobbler by occupation, had 
read of the awful persecutions of the Stundists 
in Russia and he felt that he was summoned to 
interfere in their behalf, and to plead for them. 
Crossing the sea he went to England, told his 
story to a society of Quakers in London, and 
through their influence he secured some patron- 
age from the British Government. Going thence 
to Russia, strange as it seems, he succeeded 
in pleading the cause of the persecuted Stun- 
dists in the presence of the Czar of all the 
Russias. His mission over he returned to his 
native community and to his humble occupation 
as quietly and simply as if he had gone some- 
where to buy potatoes. 

The story illustrates the sovereignty and the 
6i 



62 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES ' 

power of moral conviction. Had an ancient 
Hebrew prophet been permitted to describe this 
incident he would have characterized this man 
as God's messenger; he would have described 
the voice that spoke to him "out of the heavens," 
and his message to the Czar he would have pre- 
faced with a, "Thus saith Jehovah." 

In reading the Scriptures, particularly those of 
the Old Testament^ we come upon a great many 
instances in which God seems to speak to men in 
ways that are unknown to us and that are for- 
eign to our own experience. He appears not 
infrequently to have spoken with an audible 
voice^ and men appear to have held direct con- 
verse with Him. The inference is sometimes 
made that somehow the men of Bible times had 
a great advantage over ourselves, and that it is 
more difficult for us than it was for them to 
know the way and will of God. A better under- 
standing of the Bible serves to correct this im- 
pression, and to make it clear that in reality the 
advantage is with us. The men of Bible times 
stood much closer to the age of barbarism than 
we stand, and they had a thousand heathen cus- 
toms, prejudices, and instincts to fight against 
that the enlightenment of our times has dis- 
pelled. In the early history of Israel especially, 
and down even to the time of David, when men 



THE AUTHORITY OF CONSCIENCE 63 

desired to commune with Jehovah they were led 
by custom to resort to the Urim and the Thrum- 
mim, a kind of sacred lottery, that was manipu- 
lated by the priest, and was probably of some- 
what the same nature as the cast of dice. At 
other times they consulted the Ephod, a practice 
the nature of which we can only conjecture, but 
which appears from such detail as is supplied by 
the narratives to have been not essentially dis- 
similar to idol worship ; or they went to the sacred 
grove and waited for a sign from Jehovah in the 
rustling of the leaves and the swaying of the 
branches by the wind. 

There were times without number when God 
did speak to these men, and it was in the same 
way that He speaks to men now. He spoke 
through their conscience, and it is to their ever- 
lasting credit that they dared to regard their con- 
science as divine, and to interpret it as the voice 
of God. "Thus saith Jehovah" was their way 
of proclaiming the sanctity and the sovereignty 
of conscience. 

Perhaps the first and most important thing 
to be said about the conscience is that like the 
capacity to think and to understand it is subject 
to the law of development, and is not a manu- 
factured article, created once for all in a given 
form. We now know beyond the possibility of 



64 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

error that the race did not begin, and the indi- 
vidual does not begin with a full-orbed con- 
science. The intuitions of conscience are slowly 
awakened, its vision is slowly clarified, and its 
capacity for judgments of wisdom is slowly ex- 
panded. During this process of development 
men may be conscientious and moral in the sense 
that they are actuated by worthy motives, but 
because of their lack of knowledge and experi- 
ence they may choose imperfect and even un- 
worthy standards of conduct. The workman in 
building a house may be guided by the best of 
intentions, but ignorance of his craft may cause 
him to bungle sadly the product of his work. So 
it is that lack of knowledge and experience both 
of the inner and the outer world may result in 
wrong choices even when there is the most in- 
dubitable sincerity. 

Thus it comes about that our standards of con- 
duct, our life rules, are always relative and sub- 
ject to revision. The elementary virtues like 
honesty, truthfulness, fidelity, and purity, are 
abiding, but "on the outer edges of the expanding 
life change will always be going on, and revision 
will always be needed.* With the deepen- 
ing of moral insight, and the increase of experi- 
ence our judgments as to what should be done or 

* Borden P. Bowne. 



THE AUTHORITY OF CONSCIENCE 65 

left undone will be subject to constant modifica- 
tion. Many things that we once thought to be 
harmful are seen later to be harmless, and many 
things that we once thought to be harmless are 
seen later to be harmful, and ruinous even to char- 
acter. Religious conceptions and practices which 
we once thought to be all important are later seen 
to be of little or no importance, and ideals that 
once received but scanty notice and considera- 
tion at our hands, later become the ideals that 
dominate us. It has often been remarked of 
certain prominent saints of history that if they 
were alive to-day and maintained the same stand- 
ard of conduct now as they did then, we would 
soon have them in prison. In comparatively re- 
cent years, for example, there were prominent 
saints in this country who were slave owners, 
and who firmly believed that slavery was 
a divine institution. There were leading mem- 
bers of the church who owned distilleries, and 
there were ministers of religion even, who 
"primed" themselves for the pulpit with a glass 
of liquor. There were church members who 
believed in duelling, as a means of settling pri- 
vate grievances, or who freely lent their support 
to the lottery system in the interest of the Church. 
It may be that our motives to-day are no better 
than were the motives of our fathers, but we have 



66 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

certainly come into a larger conception of right 
and wrong, and into a riper wisdom of judgment. 
Thus it is that social customs have to be modi- 
fied, business methods have to be readjusted, po- 
litical practises, and personal habits have to be 
revised in order to meet the demands of a grow- 
ing and expanding conscience. 

Just here we come face to face with an ex- 
ceedingly interesting and withal pathetic feature 
of human history. It is the resistance that has 
been offered to the Higher revelations of con- 
science, and the price that has been paid to over- 
come that resistance. It is here perhaps that 
we come in sight of the deepest meanings of the 
cross and sacrifice of Jesus. The life that he 
lived, as well as his teaching^ made his presence 
a constant rebuke to current standards of con- 
duct. When men looked at him and came into 
his atmosphere they could no longer be satisfied 
with the life that they were living. Jesus be- 
came a disturber of their peace, and the cross 
was the penalty that they exacted from him. 
Religious beliefs and rites, social customs and 
laws appear in every generation as the register 
of moral progress in that generation, and the 
tendency of men at large is ever to regard these 
as final, and to invest them with the most solemn 
sanctions, and when some prophet of a higher 



THE AUTHORITY OF CONSCIENCE ^7 

life into whose soul has been breathed a great 
breath of freedom appears, and summons men to 
resume their march upwards, he is held to be a 
disturber and is visited with dire penalty. Thus 
it was that Jesus was ''numbered with the trans- 
gressors," because he deliberately set aside the 
life rules which had obtained among his country- 
men for generations, and by his character as well 
as by his message he summoned them to a new 
and a higher level of morality. His declaration, 
'Tt hath been said unto you by those of old time, 
but I say unto you,'' was like a blow struck in 
the very face of beliefs and customs which for 
centuries had been regarded as both sacred and 
unchangeable. Thus it was entirely within the 
nature of things that for the time the great re- 
vealer should be rejected, and persecuted even 
unto Calvary. "Man's deepest grudge is against 
the disturber who wakes him from his sleep and 
bids him resume the march onward." 

One of the greatest truths that is brought to 
light by Jesus is that neither the moral life of 
society or the individual is stationary, and the 
customs, laws, beliefs, and habits which register 
that life are never final. There is something 
ever at work in the soul of humanity that is 
pushing us on from the high to the higher, from 
the good to the better, and from the better to the 



68 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

best. Those who imagine that the conscience is 
a manufactured article, produced once for all in 
a given form, have yet to learn the first lesson of 
history. The truth is that the human soul was 
not made that way. 

From all this three truths of unimpeachable 
worth appear. The first of these is the inviola- 
ble sanctity of conscience. "The law of love and 
of loyalty to what we conceive to be right, are of 
absolute and inalienable obligation. No out- 
side authority and no conceivable change of cir- 
cumstances can absolve us from this central and 
basal duty." Not only the authors of the Bible, 
but the greatest writers from ^schylus and 
Sophocles to Channing and Webster have empha- 
sized the inviolable sanctity of conscience. When 
requested to state the greatest thought that had 
ever entered his mind, Webster, the colossal 
thinker replied, "There is no evil we cannot face 
or flee from but the consequence of duty disre- 
garded. A sense of obligation pursues us every- 
where. It is as omnipresent as the Deity. If we 
take to ourselves wings of the morning and flee 
to the uttermost parts of the sea, duty performed 
or duty violated is still with us for our happiness 
or misery. If we say that darkness shall cover 
us, in the darkness as in the light our obliga- 
tions are yet with us. We cannot escape their 



THE AUTHOmxY OP CONSCIENCE 69 

power nor fly their presence. They are with 
us in this hfe, will be with us at its close, and 
in that scene of inconceivable solemnity which 
lies yet farther on we shall find ourselves fol- 
lowed by the consciousness of duty, to pain us 
forever if it has been violated, and to console 
us so far as God has given us grace to perform 
it." Commenting upon Webster's statement, a 
distinguished preacher of our own time declares, 
— 'That weighed against the conscience the 
Universe itself is but a bubble, for God himself is 
in the conscience lending it authority."* 

The second truth is the importance of keeping 
ourselves open to the further revelations of 
conscience. An indispensable condition of moral 
progress is openness and teachableness. ''There 
is no cure," said Robertson of Brighton, "for 
ossification." Jesus declared to the people of 
his time that the publicans and sinners should 
enter the kingdom of heaven before the self- 
satisfied. ''Except ye become as little children, 
ye shall in no wise enter into the Kingdom of 
heaven." That is the Christian demand for 
openness and teachableness. 

The reason for this demand is clearly appar- 
ent. The world of moral truth is infinite and 
we are finite; it is without limitation and we 

* Newell Dwight Hillis. 



J^o A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

are limited, and the revelations of truth are 
conditioned by openness and receptivity. The 
revealing God is dependent upon the teachable- 
ness of people. Those who have nothing further 
to learn, and nothing further to attain in a moral 
way soon enter upon a process of retrogression. 
We cannot remain morally stationary. Failing 
to go forward we begin to move backward. "One 
must take every fact of nature," said Mr. Huxley, 
"and sit down before it as a little child, and be 
prepared to give up preconceived notions and 
prejudices and to follow just where the facts 
and the truth lead." He confessed also that as 
a scientist he had never found peace or rest 
until he had consented to do this. If it is neces- 
sary to be childlike in order to interpret the 
facts of nature, how much more so to appre- 
hend the higher revelations of God through con- 
science and experience. 

And the final truth to be grasped is the im- 
portance of being ruled by the spirit of charity. 
As a result of the fact that conscience is sub- 
ject to the law of development, there is always 
a region of conduct concerning which even the 
best of people are not agreed. They all desire 
to do right, but they not infrequently differ 
widely in their judgments of what is right. This 
difference of judgment is not in itself a serious 



THE AUTHORITY OF CONSCIENCE 71 

matter. On the contrary it opens the way for 
a mutual and helpful criticism that is one of the 
best guarantees of moral progress. The criti- 
cism of the conservative helps to keep the radi- 
cal from becoming unsteady and flighty, and 
the criticism of the radical helps to keep the con- 
servative from sinking into sloth and indiffer- 
ence. Unfortunately both charity and insight 
are many times sadly wanting, differences of 
judgment are supposed to be moral differences, 
and the good intentions of those who differ from 
us are suspected. The man of conservative temper 
especially is apt to regard traditional beliefs, and 
custom as the final revelation of conscience, and 
those who differ in their judgments are set down 
as the enemies of Christ and the Gospel. It is 
this fact so pathetically illustrated all through 
History that gave occasion for the famous re- 
mark of John Stuart Mill that the appeal to 
conscience is an appeal from reason to preju- 
dice and superstitution. 

Perhaps the most important truth to be 
grasped here is that one's conscience is his own 
and not another's. In the words of Prof. 
Bowne, "One may recommend his views to 
others ; may give reasons for the faith that is in 
him; but when he insists in imposing it upon 
others he may be assuming a knowledge that he 



^2 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

does not possess; and when he concludes that 
those who differ from him are morally unfaith- 
ful he then assumes a knowledge of the heart 
that he does not possess, and falls into Pharisaic 
uncharity." Every person should realize the 
futility of impatience, brow beating, and denun- 
ciation in hastening moral results, and should 
know that until that which is perfect is come 
equally good men will be found on both sides 
of every great moral issue. Meanwhile, un- 
til that which is perfect is come, there is no better 
course open than to heed the advice of Paul 
in the New Testament, — "Let each man be fully 
assured in his own mind." *'Let us therefore 
not judge one another any more. But judge 
this rather, that no man put a stumbling block 
in his brother's way or an occasion of falling." 



Every Scripture given by inspiration of God 
is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for cor- 
rection, for instruction that is in righteousness. 
— Paul. 

/ do not hesitate to recognize the quality of 
inspiration in many great books of the present 
day, and yet to me the Bible is not like any other 
book. It stands in a class by itself, apart from 
and above all other books, worthy of a reverence 
and a love which I can give to no other book. — 
Washington Gladden. 



74 



/ 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE MINISTRY OF THE BIBLE. 

Every Scripture given by inspiration of God 
is also profitable for teaching, for reproof, for 
correction, for instruction, which is in right- 
eousness." Until the appearance of the Revised 
Version of the Bible the accepted reading of this 
passage was that, "All Scripture is given by in- 
spiration of God." It was supposed that the 
statement referred to the Scripture Canon as we 
now have it, in its present form and arrange- 
ment, and it was generally used to support the 
idea that the content of the Bible had been dic- 
tated to its writers in such a way that they were 
the mere tools and instruments of the Divine 
Being. In point of fact the statement is not 
that the Bible as we now have it was thus dic- 
tated, but merely that every scripture, or com- 
position, as we would now say, that is given 
by inspiration of God is profitable in a moral and 
spiritual way. The statement referred at the 
outset to the Hebrew writings, most of which 
are included in the Old Testament. It was 
75 



76 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

these writings, in which Paul the author of the 
passage had been instructed, and it was these 
writings in which Timothy, to whom Paul was 
writing had been instructed. The statement did 
not at the first refer to the New Testament, 
since that portion of the Scripture Canon had 
not been determined, and many of its books had 
not even been composed. It is no violation of 
the spirit of the statement to make it include 
every writing, and every book thaf possesses a 
real spiritual value. Every such composition "is 
profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correc- 
tion, for instruction which is in righteousness." 
We have come to recognize that all truth is 
from God; He is its source and inspiration. 
Every book or writing is inspired of God to 
the extent that it breathes a message of spiritual 
truth, and is able to make us breath in a spiritual 
way, and to that extent also it is profitable. The 
statement of Paul applies of course to the Bible, 
but it applies with equal force to every other book 
that possesses a real spiritual worth. 

Because of the undoubted spiritual merit of 
the Bible, and because of the supreme place that 
it has so deservedly come to occupy in religious 
worship, and instruction, the question of how 
to use it, and how to teach it to the young, so 
that it will minister most effectively to character 



THE MINISTRY OF THE BIBLE ^7 

is of such moment that it demands the plainest 
and most candid answer that can be given. The 
good that we derive from the Bible of necessity 
depends very much upon how it is approached 
and upon the use that is made of it It's riches 
cannot become ours, and we cannot share them 
with others, except as we resolve each for him- 
self, to possess them by honest effort, and by 
earnest and painstaking study. 

It is evident, to begin with, that if the Bible 
is to yield the highest measure of profit very 
much depends upon the method of study that is 
employed. A common method in other years 
was to read the Bible through by course, and 
there were not a few who prided themselves 
upon the number of times that they had read 
the Bible through. This doubtless is better than 
not to read it at all, as the practice of so many 
is to day, but in view of what modern scholar- 
ship has shown the Bible to be, there is not much 
that can be said in favor of reading it through 
in this way, and there is very much that can be 
urged against it. It is clear, for one thing that 
it involves both a waste of time, and energy. 
There are many portions of the Bible that simply 
cannot be understood by this method, and to 
follow it in dealing with these portions is, to 
say the least, unprofitable. It is also true that 



78 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

this method has opened the way for a misinter- 
pretation of the content of the Bible. The story 
of the misuse and abuse of the Bible is a long 
and sorry one, and it has been caused to a very 
considerable extent by the method of reading 
by course. 

If one would read the Bible wisely, if he 
would get the highest measure of profit from it, 
the first and most important thing is to secure 
a proper introduction to the study of it, that 
will supply in brief and clear outline its external 
history, that will reveal the literary character 
of each part and section, that will acquaint the 
reader with the purpose and aims of each writer, 
and the conditions that they had in mind 
when they wrote. There are many such works 
to-day, like Adeney's, How to Read the Bible, and 
Kent's, Student's Old Testament, and Ladd's, 
What is the Bible, and Gladden's, Who Vyrote 
the Bible, and Selleck's, New Appreciation of the 
Bible, that represent the best results of modern 
research, and yet they have been written for 
busy folk who have little time to delve. They 
are readable, and even fascinating books; they 
cast a world of light upon the Bible, they give 
to it a meaning and worth which the fathers for 
all their theories of infallibility did not guess, and 
they help to awaken an interest in the readef 



THE MINISTRY OF THE BIBLE 79 

which the average man is hardly likely to ac- 
quire in any other way. 

Even more unsatisfactory, if anything, is the 
scrappy, hit or miss method that is now so much 
in vogue, and that is the particular character- 
istic of the ordinary Sunday School. Instead of 
reading the Bible in generous allotments, it is 
read in detached portions and sections, with but 
little reference to the context or to the charac- 
ter of the literature. The striking dissimilarities 
between the different books and the different 
view points of the men who wrote them are not 
understood, or in many cases even seen, and the 
basis of a real knowledge and interest is not 
acquired. The result often is that after a dozen 
years or more of this sort of Bible study, a few 
here and there awaken to the fact that they have 
acquired no very definite understanding of the 
book or its content. Others never awaken, and 
eventually they lose all interest in the Bible, 
and perhaps they never even realize what they 
have missed. When the Bible is really under- 
stood we turn to it with a manifold and varied 
interest. One part will appeal to us because of 
its strong devotional interest, another part be- 
cause of its beautiful patriotism, another part 
because it records the life story of Christ, and 
another part because of its courageous ex- 



8o A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

hortation and rebuke. Thus we turn to the 
things for which we really hunger, and which 
feed us. We turn to different parts in different 
moods, and at different times. 

The measure of good that we get from the 
Bible depends also upon the frankness and open- 
ness of mind with which we approach it, and 
upon the freedom from bias with which we con- 
sider its message. The fact is undeniable that 
the influence of the Bible has been greatly hin- 
dered by the sectarian bias with which its mes- 
sage has been interpreted. It has been read not 
so much in the interest of truth as in the inter- 
est of sectarian partisanship, to gain support 
for a theory of conversion or baptism, a theory 
of church government, of the second coming 
of Christ, the future judgment, or something 
else. Men have been more eager to read their 
own ideas into the Bible, than to listen to its 
testimony, to understand its message, and to 
catch its spirit. 

For the average man, whose religious in- 
struction and training have been of the sectarian 
kind, it is exceedingly difificult to come to the 
Bible with a mind that is free from bias, and 
yet there is nothing that is more important if 
it is to yield the highest good. It is one of the 
bancs of sectarianism that it has tended to de- 



THE MINISTRY OF THE BIBLE 8i 

stroy the capacity for unprejudiced judgment. 
To understand the Bible we must hsten to it, 
allow it to speak to us according to its ability to 
speak, and make its own impress, and we must 
not read our own notions and prejudices into it. 
We should read the Bible somewhat as we read 
the book of nature, allowing it to speak its own 
message, just as the flower, the rainbow, the sun- 
set, a bit of mountain scenery, or as a sweet day 
in June speaks for itself. The diamond wins our 
admiration simply by being a diamond, and by 
revealing its beauty and its luster to the eye. 
The lily wins our admiration by simply being a 
lily. The Truth likewise commends itself by its 
own inherent worth. The mind is made for 
truth as the lungs are made for the air, as the 
eyes are made for the sunlight, and the mind 
cannot fail to be impressed when it is brought 
into contact with the truth. Whatever truth 
the Bible contains will eventually find the heart 
if it is given a chance, not because it is in the 
Bible, but because it is truth. 

It is a matter of common experience, attested 
in the most convincing ways that when it is ap- 
proached in the right way and given a chance 
to speak for itself, the Bible has a ministry for 
the deepest and most dire of human needs. If 
one has been infirm of purpose, and false to his 



82 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

best ideals, the message of the Bible will be an in- 
vigorating influence, that is like the sunshine, 
and fresh air in their effects upon the man who 
has been overworked and over-confined. If one 
has been worsted by evil, if he has been defeated 
in life's battle, and has come to feel that the 
foes of life are many, and his helpers are few, 
the message of the Bible will bring courage, and 
will open the way for new confidence, and 
hope. If one's life has been blighted by sorrow 
and loss, if the hand of grief has been laid heav- 
ily upon him and he has come to feel that he is 
standing in the gathering darkness, silent and 
dumb, the message of the Bible will be a voice 
that speaks encouragement, an atmosphere that 
helps him to discern more clearly, a power under 
God to lift the soul into a higher life. 

Besides a rational method for studying the 
Bible, and an unprejudiced mind in approaching 
it, there is need of common sense and good judg- 
ment in the use that we make of it, especially in 
teaching it to the young. It is unquestionably 
true that the Bible as a whole is profitable for 
teaching, for reproof, for correction, for in- 
struction which is in righteousness, but it is 
not all equally profitable, and there are some 
parts which are not at all profitable as teaching 
or as reading matter. It is not meant as a dis- 



THE MINISTRY OF THE BIBLE 83 

paragement of the Bible, and in fact it is not 
a disparagement to remark that there are cer- 
tain parts which are quite unfit to be read by the 
young and immature, and we cannot force such 
portions upon them without the risk of menace 
to their character. 

The stories of barbaric cruelty in the Old 
Testament, of murder, of wicked blood-shed 
in war, of sexual lewdness, and other portions of 
a similar kind, can scarcely be regarded as prof- 
itable in a moral and spiritual way. Whatever 
interest such portions may have for the investi- 
gator they can hardly be thought profitable 
as teaching or reading matter for the young. 
There is in fact a real and urgent need for an 
expurgated text that is put in good modern 
English, and printed with clear and attractive 
type, and that contains only such parts as are 
profitable to be read. Every home with children 
and young people in it, should contain a Bible of 
this kind. 

A book of Bible stories, if it is of the right 
sort, and not merely the pious "twaddle" that is 
so frequently carted about, is likewise an invalu- 
able aid in the religious instruction of the 
young. These Bible stories rightly selected and 
expressed are still among our most effective 
means of appealing to the heart, and the thought^ 



§4 A VALID RELIGION FOR tHE TIMES 

of the child, and of giving him such truths as he 
can readily understand, appreciate, and receive. 
By the use of such stories, if the Church and 
Christian parents were half awake, the Bible 
could be made the most interesting and fascinat- 
ing book to the average child, whereas, in the 
majority of cases there is nothing that is so 
stupid and dull. A recent writer tells of a class 
of boys who spent three months under the guid- 
ance of a skillful teacher in reading the book of 
Job, and they were greatly entranced by it and 
thought it a wonderfully interesting story. 
Without doubt there are many portions of the 
Bible which could, and would be read with inter- 
est and profit by the young if there were older 
people with interest and earnestness enough to 
guide them in the study. 

To sum it all up, the Bible is full of spiritual 
interest and profit both for old and young if it 
is properly approached, and if it is rightly used. 
Hitherto a false reverence has stood in the way 
of making the best use of it. Thinking of the 
Bible simply as the word of God, men have made 
a fetich of it, and have not taken the pains to 
examine into its real contents. Many have kept 
it in their homes as if it were something like an 
old horse shoe, certain to bring good luck. They 
have thought that by saying beautiful things 



THE MINISTRY OF THE BIBLE 85 

about it they were honoring and reverencing 
the Bible. We have reason to rejoice that the 
critical study of the Bible is destroying this 
false reverence ; we are beginning to realize that 
the Bible has not descended ready made from 
the sky but has come up out of human hearts, 
that it is a human book throbbing with human 
interest. Many well meaning people in the church 
have been greatly terrified and incensed at the 
progress of the scientific study of the sacred 
book in recent years, but why should they be? 
If the Bible will not stand investigating we 
should know it. There is surely no refuge from 
facts in the ostrich method of burying the head 
in the sand. The evidence is daily accumulating 
that such study of the Bible is introducing an 
era of popular interest in Biblical study that is 
greater than the world has ever seen, that prom- 
ies much for humanity, and for the advance- 
ment of the kingdom of God. 



Pray without ceasing. — Paul. 

Prayer thus becomes not begging, but co-op er^ 
ation. It is the process of identifying our will 
and whatever effectiveness we have in the world 
with the will of God. We are rightly impatient 
with the question of answers to prayer because 
the reason for prayer is in prayer itself. . . . 
Prayer is not merely a means to an end, but its 
end is in itself. It is not the link in a chain of 
of causes, but the realisation of eternity above 
time and change. — George Albert Coe. 



86 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE PRAYER INSTINCT. 

"There is nothing that is more deeply 
wrought into human nature than the instinct of 
prayer. The motive that first prompts is a sec- 
ondary matter. We may let the theories go and 
trust the fact that man has always prayed and 
pray he always will." * It is doubtless true that 
there are those who have not thought or breathed 
a prayer since childhood who would be greatly 
surprised by this statement, *'that man has al- 
ways prayed and pray he always will," and they 
would quote themselves as the refutation of it. 
The statement nevertheless is not refuted by 
such instances, "because the person who has 
turned back upon himself and extirpated his 
highest faculty by disuse, or put it to a sleep that 
seems death, is a monstrosity and not a normal 
type, and nature always has room for monstros- 
ities." 

♦Theodore Hunger. 



88 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

The prayer instinct is a part of the contents 
of human nature. Men may try to root it out 
and to destroy it, but eventually it will come 
back. "They may let it lie neglected and unused, 
or they may set it down as a superstition and 
quote as proof thereof its prevalence among the 
ignorant and untaught the world over, forget- 
ting that universahty is itself a sign of truth. 
All this they may do and yet it remains that 
prayer is an ineradicable instinct. There will 
come a time in some solemn moment of experi- 
ence when the instinct will assert itself and they 
will pray if but to the extent of" 

*'An upward glancing of the eye 
When only God is near/' 

With a certain order of mind it has been a 
favorite theory that as man advances in wisdom 
and ripens in character the habit of prayer will 
disappear; that as the aspirations^ and longings 
which constitute the undercurrent of prayer be- 
come more perfectly realized the habit itself will 
vanish. The instinct of prayer, as Laurence 
Oliphant once put it, is deeply planted within, 
but it seems to be the instinct of a low spiritual 
creature, and when we have gotten further along 
it will not b^ ?)^^4ecl, The ^nsw^r to this nptign 



THE PRAYER INSTINCT 89 

is the life of Jesus. He was not a low spiritual 
creature. He possessed, — 

"A love without a limit 
A perfection Ht for God," 

and yet the habit of prayer was an unfailing 
characteristic. There is one passage in the New 
Testament, which, if we reflect upon it we can- 
not read without a feeling of wonder and awe. 
It is the passage that tells us how the great 
teacher went up into a mountain to pray, and 
remained all night in prayer to God. "We are 
accustomed to think of Jesus as a sort of Divine 
humanist. Whatever else we believe about him 
we are agreed in this that he was a servant of 
humanity down to the very last detail of serv- 
ice." He was the busiest and most practical of 
men, always among the people, and apparently 
with no thought but the people's good. But in 
reality the humanist is only one side of the pic- 
ture. Jesus had a passion for service that was 
marked, and he had another passion that was 
equally marked ; it was the passion for God. The 
vision of God was upon him and he could not 
break it until the morning, when full of God, he 
descended the mountain in order to minister tg 
the people. 



90 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

As a matter of fact it is not the true expres- 
sion of prayer that is in question to-day so much 
as it is the crudities of unenHghtened prayer. 
Such, for example, is the kind of prayer that 
would determine the Divine will by a human 
wish, that would turn aside the Infinite law by a 
whim; or the kind of prayer that is a beseiging 
of the gates of heaven, as if the Omnipotent 
had to be placated and made willing, and his 
favors had to be extorted from Him, and that 
fails to realize that the mercies of God await to 
descend upon us when the true attitude of trust 
and receptivity has been found; or the kind of 
prayer that would make God the accomplice of 
man's selfish schemes and plans, or that would 
substitute prayer for rational effort, and aims to 
relieve the supplicant from personal exertion and 
sacrifice. 

It is clear as the day that the argument 
against prayer that is based upon its crudities is 
wide of the mark. Even by the Greek thinkers, 
three hundred years before the Christian era 
it was recognized that it is not from the begin- 
nings of a thing, nor yet from its history that it 
is entitled to be judged, but from its final ex- 
pression. The truth that we have to remember 
when we think of the crude and imperfect forms 
of prayer that so largely prevail, is that human 



THE PRAYER INSTINCT 9I 

nature is yet in the making. We are the sons 
of God, "but it doth not yet appear what we 
shall be." With all the progress that has been 
made we are still only at the beginning. We are 
children of God and the objects of His care and 
love, but we are yet in the making. The vague 
glory flashes of possibility are always lighting 
up our future, and this fact is one that whispers 
patience, and compels reserve in all our judg- 
ments of human habits. Though a man's pray- 
ers reflect great ignorance, both of the world 
without and the world within, it may yet be that 
even in its crudest forms it has a divine sig- 
nificance, and represents a natural movement of 
the soul, ''an instinct borne of our nature and 
our position in the scheme of things," to which 
we feel that man's Creator has provided some 
adequate response. It may be that in a deeper 
and truer sense than is commonly realized, 

"The feeble hands and helpless 
Groping blindly in the darkness 
Touch God's right hand in the darkness 
And are lifted up and strengthened/' 

It is evident, therefore that it is not from its 
crude and imperfect forms that the habit of 
prayer is to be judged, but from its true idea 



92 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

and essence. "The orign and root of prayer 
is in the soul's inmost life, in the yearnings 
and aspirations Godward, the deepest of which 
never come to audible expression, in the hopes 
and longings which form the undercurrent of 
life and which lie too deep for human words. 'It 
might almost be said that prayer is merely a name 
for the whole spirit and sweep of our religious 
life, in its desires, yearnings, and hopes on its 
Godward side. But if this seems to be an unwar- 
ranted extension of the word, it may at least be 
said that it springs from the inner life of the 
Spirit, and from it derives its sincerity, its inten- 
sity and its power !" * 

'^Thrice blessed those whose lives are faithful 
prayers, 
Whose loves in higher love endures.'^ 

From the earliest times of the Christian period 
a clear conviction of the Divine origin of the 
prayer instinct has found expression. "Thou 
hast made us for thyself," cries Augustine, "and 
our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee." 
In recent years, especially since the writings of 
Hegel appeared, this conviction has been greatly 
deepened and strengthened. A new conception 

* Prof. G. B. Stevens. 



THE PRAYER INSTINCT 93 

of human nature, that has mightily appealed to 
the modern mind and has all but triumphed in 
the sphere of speculative thought, is the essential 
contribution of the great German. Man is now 
regarded as the organ of the Infinite conscious- 
ness. The incarnation of the Divine that is 
claimed by the New Testament for the life of 
Christ is now seen to be a universal fact. The 
chief difference is that what the personality of 
Jesus represents in its fulness, the ordinary na- 
ture represents in a more or less imperfect way. 
It is not that Jesus is degraded by this modern 
conception, but that ordinary man is lifted into 
a new light, and is recognized to be in germ at 
least an infinite possibility. *'We have but to 
dig deep enough into the lowest and meanest hu- 
man nature to come upon Divinity.'^ 

It is clear that when we come with this con- 
ception of man's nature to a study of human 
worship we have secured another standpoint for 
discussing it. It has often been supposed that 
the impulse to pray originates with man himself, 
whereas, the truth is that it originates with the 
Divine thought at the center of man's nature, 
which rises in him and permeates his being as 
the sap rises in the tree, and makes itself felt in 
noble aspirations and desires. "We may think 
of prayer as we think of the action of sun and 



94 A VALID RELIGION FOR TitE TIMES 

rain; From out of the ocean the sun draws up 
the vapors which are later given back in the 
form of rain." Thus it is that the Divine touch 
upon the soul sets in motion the secret aspira- 
tions and desires which arise to the Unknown, 
and afterwards descend as moisture to strengthen 
the character and to heighten and to purify the 
desires. 

*'We kneel, how weak, We rise, how full of 

power: 
Why therefore should we do ourselves this 

wrong 
Or others, that we are not always strong. 
That we are ever overborn with care 
That we should ever weak or heartless he. 
Anxious or troubled^ when with us is prayer" 
And joy and strength and courage are with 

Theef" 

With this conception of prayer we can better 
understand the power that it represents and 
what it may achieve. It is not the triumphing 
of human knowledge over Divine knowledge, or 
the prevailing of the human will over God's will, 
but the alliance of human knowledge with God's 
knowledge and the human will with His will. 
This is clearly the lesson of Jesus' life. Few of 



THE PRAYER INSTINCT 95 

his prayers have been preserved, because they 
were uttered, or rather breathed out in silence, 
when he was in the stillness of the night, under 
the stars in the open desert, or in the solitude 
of the mountain top. One of the most signifi- 
cant of his prayers that have come to us, a prayer 
that was uttered in the supreme moment of his 
life, when the hatred of men was culminating 
against him, and when the cross stood just be- 
fore him, should receive our special notice. It 
is a supreme expression of submission and trust. 
"Father if it be possible let this cup pass from 
me, nevertheless not as I will but as Thou wilt." 
This is everywhere and always the essential spirit 
of prayer in its deepest and truest sense. The 
example of Jesus is a living exposition of this 
fundamental theme, and the corrective of all our 
formulas and definitions of prayer. We have 
not done the best that we can do until we have 
brought our ideas of prayer into the light of his 
teaching and life. 

It is here perhaps more than anywhere that 
the popular mind is confused, and is in desperate 
need of being rescued from mistake. It has 
been insistently taught that if we shall ask any- 
thing in his name, it shall be given to us. Fail- 
ing to grasp the limitation imposed by the use of 
these words, "in his name," many have askecj 



96 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

everything, from the changing of the weather, 
and the alteration of nature's laws, and the gain- 
ing of health, wealth, position and knowledge, 
to the securing of an advantage over a rival 
in a business deal. Great disappointment, heart- 
ache, loss of confidence in prayers, doubts of 
God's existence, or the suspicion that if He does 
exist he doesn't care, have been the natural and 
inevitable outcome. "If ye shall ask anything in 
my name I will do it," but we must not fail to 
grasp the significance of this Hebraism, "in my 
name." In the Hebrew mode of thought the 
name was the symbol of the inmost nature or 
essence of him who bore it. Thus God's name 
is a "strong tower," meaning thereby that God 
himself in his character and perfection is this. 
The name of Jesus stands for his essential char- 
acter and spirit, and to ask in his name is to ask 
in his spirit, with his conception of the Father, 
with his understanding of both the inner and 
the outer world, and with the limitation that 
such insight necessarily implies. 

It is not meant that prayer is the voice of 
supineness, but rather that it is the voice of 
alliance and cooperation. When the will of God 
conflicts with our own plans, and runs counter 
to our wishes, and disturbs our repose, it is 
clearly necessary that we should submit, and it 



THE PRAYER INSTINCT 97 

is well for us to settle in our thought that the 
will of God is good and that it ought to be done. 
It is clearly possible, however, to mistake supine- 
ness for submission. A man suffering from dis- 
ease, the result of his own imprudence, or from 
limitation, the result of his own lack of earnest 
endeavor, may easily drug his conscience, and 
stifle its protest with the idea that his misfortune 
has to be borne because it is the will of God, 
whereas the truth is that his misfortune is not 
the portion that God has chosen for him but the 
portation that he has chosen for himself. 

It should be steadily born in mind that God 
wills beauty, health, symmetry, vigor, virtue 
and courage ; he wills charity, fidelity, tenderness, 
brotherhood and service; He wills that love and 
joy and peace should abound, and to pray in the 
name of Christ is to ally ourselves with the will 
of God and to hope, aspire, live, and labor with 
Him for the realization of these ends. It is out 
of such alliance with the Infinite that the confi- 
dence is borne — 

"That more things are wrought by prayer 
Than this world dreams of, 
For what are men better than sheep or goats 
That nourish a blind life in the brain. 



98 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

If knowing God they lift not hands of prayer 
Both for themselves and those who call them 

friend; 
For so the whole round world is every way 
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God" 



"Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and 
of the knowledge of the son of God, unto a per- 
fect man, unto the measure of the stature of the 
fulness of Christ." — Paul. 

Schleirmacher's "pectus est quod theologum 
facet,'' is true in a wider sense than he intended 
it. Deep down in the inmost feeling is that phil- 
osophy of the unconscious which waits yet to he 
explored, is buried the real secret of our theolo- 
gies, — J. Brierley. 



100 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE INFLUENCE OF TEMPERAMENT. 

What men see, believe, and find attractive, 
in the inner as well as in the outer realm, depends 
as much upon the instrument of vision as upon 
the truth itself. It is by no means strange that 
one's intellectual complexion should color his 
religious faith, and determine in considerable 
measure the type of his spiritual character. Dif- 
ferences of temperament are a fact and not a 
fiction. They belong to the rational nature and 
constitution. There is such a thing as a tem- 
peramental bent. 

"So in every human body 
The choler melancholy, flem and blood. 
By reason that they flow continually 
In some one part, and are not continent 
Receive the name of humors. Now, thus far 
It may by metaphor, apply itself 
Unto the general disposition 
As when some one peculiar quality 
Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw 

lOl 



162 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

All his effects, his spirit, and his powers 
In their confluctions, all to run one way. 
This may he truly said to he a humor J' 

It is no doubt true that there is something 
universal in religion, something that is fitted 
to all men and adapted to their needs, ir- 
respective of mental coloring or type, and 
the conviction, of the Christian world at least, 
is that Jesus more than any other teacher 
who has ever lived, grasped this universal sub- 
stance and gave it consummate expression, both 
in his message and in his life. In the process 
of disseminating the message of Jesus, and the 
truth he represents, that which is so universally 
human that it fits all men's needs, has been 
warped and narrowed down, through tempera- 
mental bias, until in instance after instance it 
has fitted only those of a particular type. 

In developing their systems, declares one 
writer,* men act as trees act in building up their 
structure. The oak by its "oak instinct" seeks 
the outside elements in air, soil, and sunlight, 
which are appropriate to it, and then turns them 
into its own likeness. The thousand things re- 
pugnant to it, or which its assimilatory power 
does not reach, it leaves alone. In like manner 

*J. Brierley. 



INFLUENCE OF TEMPERAMENT 103 

according to their secret affinities, the disciples 
of Christ have selected from the material which 
he gave, that which most strikes and best suits 
their respective mental types, and they have as- 
similated, and embodied what they have selected 
very much as the tree does. For doing this no 
blame can justly be attached; it was the natural 
and inevitable result of differences in tempera- 
mental bent. It is merely the failure to be ruled 
by the spirit of charity in judging points of view 
other than their own that deserves to be con- 
demned. 

If we take, to begin with, the various creedal 
and doctrinal concepts that have been held within, 
the Christian faith, it is a fair question whether 
the marked divergencies that lie here are so 
much the result of a purely reasoning process as 
they are of temperament. A splendid illustra- 
tion to the point is the contrast that is presented 
in the religious careers of the two famous Eng- 
lish brothers, John Henry Newman, author of 
*'Lead Kindly Light," and a Cardinal of the Ro- 
man Catholic Church, and Frances W. Newman, 
a thinker and writer of wide repute. These men 
who were born of the same parents, brought 
up under the same Christian teaching and 
faith, equipped with intellectual gifts of the first 
rank, and devoted to the highest personal ideals 



104 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

and ends, nevertheless, in their search for 
truth, arrived at the very farthest extremes. 
*'One of them came to a place where he denied 
the validity of all the distinctively Christian 
creeds, and the other to a place where he saw in 
the creed "the ingrafted word which is able to 
save the soul," and yielded himself to the au- 
thority of Rome, affirming that the publisher of 
heresy should be treated as if he were embodied 
evil." Points of view so different, held by two 
men so closely related, and each so high minded 
and pure, can hardly have been the result of a 
purely reasoning process. It is clear that an- 
other element must have entered in, and that 
was the temperament. 

What occurred in these two cases has been 
happening to a very considerable extent over the 
whole great field. The positions arrived at by 
the different thinkers and so loudly championed 
by the different sects can never be understood 
apart from the workings of the temperament. 
The deeper we look here the more certain it be- 
comes that reasoning as such, has had but a 
minor part to play in the formation of the dif- 
ferent creeds, and the varioiis religious sects. 
Standing at the very beginning of the Christian 
movement and in vital relation to it we have in 
three representative figures, namely, John, Paul 



INFLUENCE OF TEMPERAMENT 105 

and James, conspicuous illustrations of three 
mental types. Each has a different system of 
thought to offer. The Christian Gospel is one 
thing to John, another thing to Paul, and still 
another thing to Jarnes. "It is life and power 
and inspiration to each," but their explanations 
of it diverge and even clash at many points. 
There is one faith but there is not one Christol- 
ogy. Christ was central in the thought of each, 
but he was by no means conceived in the same 
way by each. 

The same thing has been repeating itself all 
through the history of the Christian Church. 
Hundreds in every generation with essentially 
the same material to go upon have come to the 
most varying conceptions of that material. Thus 
have arisen the countless sects, which seem at 
times such a terrible mistake and waste. To 
many thoughtful people it is becoming more ap- 
parent all the while that the different religious 
sects, the result of the varying temperaments 
that created them, while not representing the 
truth in its entirety, as their representatives have 
so fondly supposed, have nevertheless, served as 
a means of getting at the truth. "They have all 
been tunnelling through the same mountain, and 
the work of each will surely count for something 
in the final result." 



io6 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

In the various types of piety to be found 
within the Christian faith there is also traceable 
the influence of temperament. On the one hand 
is the mystic, the nature that is ruled and mas- 
tered by the sense of the unseen, the nature that 
finds its most congenial atmosphere in worship, 
that loves to dwell upon the mountain top, to 
gaze at the stars, to see visions, to dream dreams, 
and that finds in religious contemplation the 
gateway of heaven to the waiting soul. The 
New Testament representative of this type is the 
Apostle John, In him, as in no other figure of 
the early Christian age, the mystical element in 
religion reveals itself. John fairly revels in 
contemplation, secret aspirations and worship. 
From the time of the New Testament until the 
present moment this type has reappeared. In 
certain outstanding figures of Christian history, 
like St. Augustine and Francis of Assizi we see 
the most conspicuous examples of this temper. 
It is said of the latter especially that often while 
in prayer he fell into veritable raptures, that he 
partook of the Lord*s supper with ecstasies in 
which his soul was rapt and suspended In God, 
and when he thought of the cross of Jesus he 
wept so copiously that eventually it ruined his 
eyes. 

The extreme examples of this religious type 



INFLUENCE OF TEMPERAMENT 107 

are apt to be visionary and unpractical. Like 
Thales of old, who in walking and gazing at the 
stars, is said to have stumbled and fallen into 
a well, and was thereupon reminded that he was 
so busy in trying to discover what is going on 
in heaven that he was not able to direct his feet, 
the people of this tem.per often see the sky but 
fail to see the earth. The heights are evident to 
them, but not the valleys. They have spiritual 
fervor but they lack judgment. They are readily 
moved to tears by a pathetic story, but it may be 
that they are cold and indifferent to a case of 
real distress. They are easily stirred by the 
thought of the world's need, and dream of doing- 
great things in far off lands, but it may be that 
they have no eyes for the need that lies at their 
very door. 

On the other hand is the nature that is ruled 
by the sense of duty, that is not given to fervors 
and ecstasies, whether of joy or remorse, that 
experiences neither deep distress from the 
thought of sin, nor great rapture from the 
thought of forgiveness. This is the moral type 
that is founded upon conscience and puts the 
emphasis upon duty. The New Testament repre- 
sentative of this temper is James the Lord's 
brother. He is the apostle of law, and his reli- 
gion is that of works. He declares, ''that who- 



io8 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

soever shall keep the whole law and offend in 
one point is guilty of all." 'Ture religion and 
undefiled before God and the Father is this, to 
visit the fatherless and the widows in their af- 
fliction and to keep himself unspotted from the 
world." That is the religion of works. John 
might have his visions,, and Paul might be caught 
up to the seventh heaven of spiritual fervor, but 
James continued to walk in the narrow path of 
duty and to insist upon works. This type also, 
has continued to reproduce itself. These are 
the people who pay well, but do not pray well. 
Their voice is scarcely ever heard in meeting, 
but they bear the brunt of Church work, and 
v/ithout their silent devotion and giving, the aver- 
age Church would have to close its doors. The 
danger of this temper is formality and legalism. 
When spiritual vision is not assiduously culti- 
vated the religious life may easily exhaust itself 
in outward observances and forms. 

Another contrast is presented in the nature 
that leans toward subservience and finds its con- 
genial atmosphere in the Roman kind of faith, 
and the nature that leans toward freedom and 
finds its element in the atmosphere of some Prot- 
estant sect. To one there is no room for liber- 
ality in religion, but only for subservience, a 
liberal Christian is a contradiction of terms, and 



INFLUENCE OF TEMPERAMENT 109 

tolerance for other statements of faith is not to 
be encouraged but condemned. To the other 
breadth of sympathy is all in all, and the spirit 
of tolerance outweighs a multitude of sins. 
Over against the bigotry of the one temper 
in its extremer forms is the shallowness of 
the other that is full of mercy for every other 
opinion because it has no clear opinions of its 
own, and that is tolerant toward every other 
faith because it cares little for any faith. Again 
there is the contrast between the nature that 
leans toward self repression, and has for its 
watchword, "Mortify therefore your members 
which are upon the earth," and the nature that 
leans toward self expression and joyfully cries, 
**A11 things are yours and ye are Christ's and 
Christ is God's." 

We have yet to ask what all this amounts to, 
and what lessons we are to draw from it. One 
thing at least becomes evident, the Christian ideal 
is larger than any person's or any group of per- 
sons' grasp and interpretation of it. Rightly 
understood .it is large enough to fit all natures 
irrespective of mental type. Here it is that sec- 
tarianism in religion shows its limitation, and 
proves its temporary character, in spite of the 
fact that it has subserved some very useful ends. 
It has warped the Christian ideal and narrowed 



no A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

it down to a particular mental type. "What 
Christ made broad enough to fit all men has 
been narrowed down to fit a particular kind of 
men, and temperamental differences have been 
mistaken for grades of spiritual life/'* The 
emotional temperament in particular has been 
exalted by the sects. Forms of worship and 
modes of Church life have been adapted to this 
particular type. The strong, sincere, practical, 
but emotionally ungifted person has not been ap- 
praised at his true spiritual worth. His spirit- 
uality has been questioned, and in various ways 
he has been rated as of lower spiritual rank. 
There has been a lack of true perspective and a 
wrong division of the word of truth. 

Sectarianism has been like an artist who paints 
a picture and draws the house in the foreground 
no larger than the man who occupies the hill be- 
hind the house, and who draws the bridge in 
the distance no larger than the man who is about 
to cross the bridge. The Christian body is slowly 
emerging from this limitation. "It is beginning 
to recognize and to teach that the normal exer- 
cise of one faculty is neither a more nor a less 
spiritual act than the normal exercise of any 
other faculty." And out of the sectarianism of 
the past there is gradually developing a church 

*Prof. Geo. A. Coe. 



INFLUENCE OF TEMPERAMENT in 

life that is broad enough to recognize ''that 
merely filling one's station in life, in the fear of 
God and the love of men is a spiritual act." 

In the Book of Revelation the inspired seer 
draws the picture of a perfect city, the city of 
God, the new Jerusalem, and he declares that 
the length, the breadth, and the height of it were 
equal. The significant thing to be noticed is 
that the seer puts into his city what he would 
like to see in the character. Height stands for 
vision, length stands for the sense of duty, and 
breadth stands for sympathy. These are the 
universal elements. It is because the character 
of Jesus so perfectly equalizes and embodies 
them that it possesses a representative and uni- 
versal value. Growth in Christlikeness means 
essentially the perfection and equalization of 
these spiritual elements in ourselves and in the 
Christian body. 

At the present stage of Christian development 
intellectual unanimity is not possible, but life is 
one thing and the theory of it another. "A man 
may be perfectly healthy, with a hopelessly 
wrong doctrine of nutrition or without any doc- 
trine at all. New Testament Christianity offer- 
ing us on the part of its most prominent leaders 
three or four separate theories, and showing the 
Christ living in and ennobling them all, gives us 



112 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

an all sufficing lesson of the relative value of 
theory and fact. We should strive ever for a 
coherent system, but we should realize that the 
root of the matter lies not there, but in the Eter- 
nal Life which the theory seeks to express,"* 



*J. Brierley. 



The unclean spirit when he is gone out of the 
man, passeth through waterless places, seeking 
rest, and finding none, he saith I will turn back 
unto my house whence I came out. And when 
he is come he Undeth it swept and garnished. 
Then goeth he and taketh to him seven other 
spirits more evil than himself ; and they enter in 
and dwell there; and the last state of that man 
becometh worse than the first. — Jesus. 

It is by life, by full, vigorous, emphatic exist- 
ence that men are safe in this world, and that 
they sa^e other men from death. — Phillips 
Brooks. 



114 



CHAPTER X. 

THE POWER OF A POSITIVE IDEAL. 

There is a kind of goodness that is merely 
negative, that is characterized by sterile peni- 
tence aid vain regrets, and that issues in ''con- 
secrated do-nothingism," The picture of the 
house that was swept and garnished and left va- 
cant was Christ's comment upon this type of 
goodness. 'The unclean spirit when he is gone 
out of the man passeth through waterless places 
seeking rest, and finding none, he saith, I will 
turn back unto my house whence I came out. And 
when he is come he findeth it swept and gar- 
nished. Then goeth he and taketh to him seven 
other spirits more evil than himself; and they 
enter in and dwell there, and the last state of 
that man becometh worse than the first." The 
great teacher was speaking to a generation who 
believed in demoniac possession, and he here em- 
ploys the language of accommodation. Trans- 
lated into the terms of our own thought the figure 
affirms the futilty of rrvere negation. Negative 
goodness, he declares, is no match for the evil 
US 



Ii6 A VALID kELIGlON FOR THE TIMES 

that is in the world. It leaves the life barren, 
ineffective and defenseless. 

Numerous attempts have been made all 
through history at a merely negative goodness, 
and they have all shown the same fundamental 
weakness, an inability to cope successfully with 
evil. This was the limitation of Judaism. Its 
ideal on the whole was negative, and hence it 
was merely temporary and preparatory. Its 
spirit was, *'Thou shalt not." At least seven of 
the commandments of the decalogue begin with 
a "Thou shalt not." The result of this negative 
attitude was that Judaism had to protect itself 
by quarantine and isolation^ it could not cope suc- 
cessfully with evil. During the course of many 
centuries it made little progress in the direction 
of a world conquest, and in the New Testament 
age the condition of Judaism closely resembled 
the picture of the garnished house. The house 
had been swept and garnished, but the evil spirit 
that had been cast out, had returned and had 
brought with him other spirits more wicked than 
himself. Idolatry, the common vice of the 
ancient world had been cast out, but the spirit of 
letter worship, formalism, pride, selfishness and 
hypocrisy had entered in_, and had taken the place 
that was left vacant, and the last state of Judaism 
was worse than the first. 



TH£ POW^k OF A POSITIVE IDEAL n^ 

The Christian ideal on the other hand is posi- 
tive. It summons to a goodness that is of a vital, 
vigorous, self-sacrificing, and self-communicat- 
ing sort. Life more abundant, is its keynote. 
Moses said, "Thou shalt not," and Jesus said, 
"Thou shalt." Under the Mosaic ideal saintli- 
ness was safeguarded by isolation, and under the 
Christian ideal it is safeguarded by contact. The 
one said, "Quarantine yourself against the 
world," and the other says, "Go ye into all the 
world." The symbol of the one is water, that is 
able to cleanse, but runs the risk of contamination 
in the process, and the symbols of the other are 
salt, light, leaven. Under the one ideal "he who 
does no evil is a good man, and under the other 
he who does no good is a bad man." 

Coming now to particulars it may be said that 
the positive is the only true defensive; it is the 
secret of moral safety. Human life everywhere 
and always means exposure. If this were not so 
we could not have moral character. If there 
were no conflict there would be no defeat, but 
neither would there be any victory; we should 
have a birdlike innocence, but we could not have 
humanity with all its great history and work. 
Moral trial cannot be avoided, since it beats ever 
upon us. The material out of which sin is made 
enters into every heart of man, and the true pro- 



ii8 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE tIMES 

tective is "full^ vigorous, positive, and affirma- 
tive existence." There is no strength or refuge 
in mere negations. Not to do evil, not to hate 
one's neighbor, not to injure other people, not 
to covet, nor envy, nor to judge uncharitably, 
are, as far as they go, both commendable and de- 
sirable, and yet they are mere negations. They 
do not state life ''actively, gladly, kindly"; they 
shut the soul up to the repressive atmosphere of 
the Old Testament. They do not lead us into 
the exhilaration of the New; they leave us with 
our life swept, garnished, and vacant. 

It is only by full, vigorous, and positive living, 
says the New Testament, that safety is to be 
found. "Put on therefore the Lord Jesus Christ 
and make no provision for the lust of the flesh." 
There must be wholesome preoccupation, the life 
must be filled with interests that leave no room 
for sin, the practice of virtue is a defense 
against vice, duty doing is a moral antiseptic. 
In the long drawn battle with disease there has 
been developed the principle of innoculation, and 
by the application of this principle it seems not 
unlikely that many diseases which hitherto have 
been the scourge of civiHzation will some day be 
robbed of their terror. It is not that the disease 
germs are destroyed, but that a new capacity of 
resistance is established, against which the germs 



THE POWER OF A POSITIVE IDEAL 119 

are powerless. That also is the secret of moral 
safety. In the midst of conditions where men 
are dragged down by deadening frivolity, or by 
the hard cynical thoughts of their fellows, where 
honesty is besieged, and purity is daily solicited 
the positive attitude and ideal are the only sure 
protective. Mere negations will not answer, be- 
cause they leave us "soft, limp, and impotent." 
Active goodness radiates power, it is full of 
moral tonic, and invigoration, it directly and im- 
mediately strengthens. 

'Tt is by life, full, vigorous, and emphatic life 
that men are safe in this world. Men are trying 
to be safe by stifling life, by living just as low as 
possible. They are trying not to do one another 
any harm, trying to spare each other's souls by 
tender petting, by guarding them from any vigor- 
ous contact with life. But only by the fulness 
of life does safety come. The message of Jesus 
from the first to the last is an assertion of the 
fundamental importance of vitality, that the first 
thing which a man needs to live well, is to live."* 

The positive is the secret of all helpful influ- 
ence. It makes men safe and it makes them 
saviours. Safety and helpfulness are the two 
great privileges of worthy manhood, and both are 
bound up with the positive ideal. "A, safe soul 

* Phillips Brooks, 



120 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

becomes a saviour of other souls." In all life 
these two things go together. No man can be 
really safe so that the world shall not harm and 
poison him unless there is going out from him a 
saving influence to other men. Goodness is com- 
municating; it tends to diffuse itself; we cannot 
have it without imparting it. Jesus moved in 
the midst of sordidness and selfishness, tempta- 
tions beat upon him as they beat upon other 
men, but he was saved by his wholesome conse- 
cration. He was without sin, and the atmos- 
phere that he carried with him was like a fresh 
west wind that blows across a pestilential swamp. 
The germs of evil were swept away; those whom 
his spirit blessed could not be hurt. Thus also 
the quiet, unassuming mother whose life is of 
such a quality that evil thoughts simply shrink 
away may become unconsciously the safeguard 
of the entire family circle. By the contagion of 
her purity and simplicity, sin and worldliness are 
shut out from the lives of her dear ones. The 
good life ever imparts itself, and the contagion 
of goodness kills the poison of badness. 

People sometimes think that they can be safe 
without being helpful, and thence have come all 
the selfish notions of salvation. A good deal of 
our religion has been like a man who tries to 
crawl through the world with face and mouth 



THE POWER OF A POSITIVE IDEAL 121 

so bandaged up with caution that the foul air of 
life cannot affect him ; or like a man who tries to 
gird himself with a life preserver, strike out from 
the wreck and swim ashore, shaking off the 
drowning men who clutch at him. Salvation 
should not thus be reckoned; the greatest of all 
unfaith is selfishness; "He that saveth his life 
shall lose it." 

Beautiful and suggestive is the Eastern story 
of a king who died and came to heaven's gate, 
and there was told that friends, and kin who long 
before had passed from earth, had failed to gain 
an entrance into heaven, that they were now in 
hell. The king was commanded to enter and to 
''dwell forever with the blessed, and he answered, 
nay, I myself will go to hell, for I cannot pos- 
sibly separate my life from theirs." Then a voice 
declared, "Thou hast borne the last test," and 
the dearly loved appeared and embraced him, and 
voiced their joyful welcome. The story is a 
parable. We cannot have salvation indepen- 
dently of our fellow men. He who would take 
it on such terms is not worthy of it, and is not 
capable of receiving it. He only whose spirit is 
so wrapped up in the welfare of others that he 
would rather suffer with them than to know the 
bliss of heaven without them ever really discov- 



122 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

ers the secret of life in this world or in the here- 
after. 

One of the greatest needs of Church life to- 
day is a rebirth of a positive ideal. Much has 
been said recently of the widespread indifference 
to the church, and there is apparently no ade- 
quate reason to doubt the fact. At a time when 
the world is visibly improved, and humanity as 
never before is open to the Christian message, 
when there is a growing love for truth as such, 
and a deepening conviction that Christianity is 
the religion of truth, and when there is emerging 
a new confidence in the pre-eminence of spirit, a 
new vision of life's hidden reinforcements, and 
a new spirit of service, it is strange indeed that 
Church life should make so little progress, that 
in fact it should have to struggle desperately in 
many quarters to maintain itself. "The Church 
has largely lost its power to correct, coerce, com- 
mand. Its old-time warnings like the ancient 
guns have ceased to be effective. The venerable 
proof texts upon which the creed formerly rested 
securely, no longer carry conviction. Over 
against the doors of the Church are scoffers who 
call it a blind leader of the blind. They have 
always been there but the present crowd is larger 
and composed of a different class."* 

* Joseph Henry Crooker. 



THE POWER OF A POSITIVE IDEAL 123 

The cause of this weakness is not superficial. 
It involves the whole character of the Church's 
message and work. "What men want more than 
all things, is a religion into which their whole 
manhood can go, and that at the present is what 
they fail to find." The Church does not supply 
it for them. Church life has had too much of 
the negative atmosphere of the Old Testament 
and not enough of the positive atmosphere of the 
New. It is said that when Ian Maclaren was 
a young man and in his first parish, he was 
chilled and discouraged by the cold and blight- 
ing atmosphere that he found there. Instead of 
abounding love and stimulation there was only 
criticism and repression, and he began to feel that 
the ministry was not his appointed sphere, and 
had almost decided to abandon it. Then came 
the call to another ministry, and the young man 
passed from repressive negation into an atmos- 
phere that was warm, genial, exhilarating, and 
inviting. He still stumbled in his speech, and 
was sometimes awkward in his delivery, but note 
how a member of the new parish spoke to him 
at the close of an unusually difficult service. "If 
you are getting fast for a word or a thought, 
just give out a psalm and we'll sing it, for we 
are all a-loving you and a-praying for you," and 
that atmosphere made Ian Maclaren a preacher. 



124 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

That is the atmosphere that always attracts, ex- 
hilarates, inspires, and conquers. Negation is 
depressing and repressing. "A child who is ad- 
dressed affirmatively, thrives under the speech. 
Eulogize his victories instead of censuring his 
defeats, make more of his virtues than of his 
faults and he will leap to noble doings. A 
teacher who lives in mere negations creates an 
atmosphere of suspicion, and helps to smother the 
growing lives he was appointed to train. A 
teacher who lives in the positive, who loves and 
trusts, creates an atmosphere of hope, that woos 
and entices the coveted triumph."* 

How positive and stimulating was the spirit 
of Jesus. He said, '1 came not to destroy, but 
to fulfill." He breathed upon each bud of truth 
that he found anywhere and sought to coax it 
into blossom. He took each partial truth and 
tried to extend it. He laid his finger upon the 
latent generosity and half conscious faith of men 
and tried to educate them. He took the rem- 
nants of goodness that he found in. the poor, 
shattered lives, and out of them many times he 
constructed a worthy character. 

"So kindly did he love us men, 
We had not heard of love before, 

*J. H. Jowett. 



THE POWER OF A POSITIVE IDEAL 125 

That all our life grew glorious when 
He had halted at our door. 



So meekly did he love us men 

Though all our life was stained with 
sin 

He touched our eyes with tears, and then 
Let God's sweet angels in." 

That must be the spirit of Church life. It 
must be positive and not merely negative; it 
must seek to fulfill and not merely to destroy; 
it must seek to guide and not merely to repress ; 
it must radiate power and sympathy, inspiration 
and help. Many a life all about the Church is 
like a river flowing through a flat country, whose 
waters overflow its banks, and fill every hollow 
and crevice, creating marshes, pools and swamps, 
and because it is so shallow, and its current is so 
sluggish, the river is useless for the purposes of 
commerce. By and by the hills come near to 
the river, and they come not to destroy but to 
fulfill. The channel of the river is deepened and 
strengthened, its banks become alive with busy 
towns and cities, everywhere may be heard the 
hum of mills and factories, and a thousand ships 
ride upon its surface. Thus it is that the Church 
should serve humanity. Its mission is to fulfill 



126 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

and not merely to destroy, to direct and not 
merely to repress. Not a single passion, appe- 
tite or aptitude of human nature can be eradica- 
ted, but all can be guided into rational and whole- 
some fulfillment. 



Is not the life more than meat, and the body 
than raiment? — Jesus. 

"All doctrines, all policies and civilizations 
exurge from you; 

All sculpture and monuments, and anything in- 
scribed anywhere are tallied in you. 

The gist of histories and statistics as far back as 
the records reach, is in you this hour, and 
myths and tales the same. 

If you were not breathing and zvalking here 
where would they all be? 

The most renowned poems would be ashes, ora- 
tions and plays would be vacuums." 

— Whitman. 



128 



CHAPTER XL 

THE NEED OF A TRUE ESTIMATE OF VALUES. 

The Question of what may deservedly be 
sought because it is truly valuable is all impor- 
tant. The savage, unaccustomed to the standards 
of civilization will exchange for a trinket a 
collection of furs that to the shrewd and not 
overscrupulous trader is worth hundreds, or 
even thousands of dollars, and he will surrender 
a tract of land, or a stretch of forest that repre- 
sents untold worth for a gun of antiquated pat- 
tern, and a supply of ammunition that is soon 
exhausted. His lack of discernment in measur- 
ing ordinary material values makes him the easy 
victim of unprincipled expoliation. 

In the most various and convincing ways the 
truth is brought home to us all the while that de- 
lusion in respect to values is common elsewhere 
than amongst primitive and unsophisticated peo- 
ples. A careful scrutiny of prevailing standards 
and choices in reference to life's higher interests 
and meaning affords abundant material for seri- 
ous and somewhat dubious reflection. It is com- 
129 



130 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

tnonly supposed that we value what is truly valu- 
able, and our exclamations of approval pass from 
lip to lip, but if we ever take the trouble to go to 
the New Testament we discover that such is not 
always the fact, by any means. All too often 
our judgments of value are like echoes that re- 
flect whatever cry may happen to penetrate the 
atmosphere. We are prone to be sheep-like in 
our admirations. When one, the bell-wether, 
has taken by a chance a certain course, all the 
others follow after. The loss that results from 
this "gregarious and indiscriminate admiration" 
is inevitable. Personal character is injured, and 
the progress of the heavenly kingdom is retarded. 
It may be stated unqualifiedly that the supreme 
end of religious education is to develop a true 
estimate of values and to lead men to seek what 
is truly valuable. 

In our judgments of what makes life worth 
the effort, and what constitutes its chief inter- 
est there is an evident need of a true estimate of 
values. That things are made for men, and not 
men for things, and that success is to be meas- 
ured by the development of character and not by 
material possessions would seem to be self-evident 
propositions, but all too often the standard is just 
reversed. 

It is not life but a living, that in the case of the 



NEED OF A TRUE ESTIMATE 131 

average man is the paramount concern. With a 
countless throng it is the food, drink, and rai- 
ment of mere subsistence upon which the sole 
accent is layed. In the fierce struggle for exist- 
ence which claims such a large proportion of the 
race not a few are crushed and brutalized by 
their conditions, chiefly because they have never 
learned to measure life in other than material 
terms. For many others, and this is a material- 
ism of a baser sort, it is the struggle not for sub- 
sistence, but for a surfeit of wealth and luxuries 
that is allowed to absorb the strength and to dis- 
sipate the energies. By all such the question of 
what a man is worth is answered in terms of 
dollars and cents. He who has made a fortune, 
although his soul has dried up in the process 
until all its juices are gone and only the thin, 
fierce lust of accumulation is left is adjudged to 
be a success, and he who has lost a fortune is 
said to have failed. "To many there is no other 
conception of the enlargement and enrichment 
of life than to multiply its outward luxuries. 
Food, drink and raiment having been obtained 
sufficient for all normal and wholesome use, the 
one concern is for more and finer food, drink 
and raiment. It may now be pate de foie gras 
instead of salt pork, champagne instead of beer, 
silk and broadcloth instead of corduroy and 



132 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

calico. A mansion on the avenue, a villa or a 
palace in Newport in place of the humble home 
on the back street. But all too often the object 
of life has not changed. It is just as material- 
istic as ever. Its tone has not risen, it has rather 
lowered. There is no spiritual purpose or mean- 
ing to it in their eyes. They are so busy making 
a living that they never stop to think about the 
life."* 

How absurd, were it not so pathetic, would all 
this appear. It is as if one should try to kindle 
a fire with a canvas of Raphael or Murillo, and 
should succeed in kindling the fire, but at the ex- 
pense of the priceless canvas. It is but a repeti- 
tion on another scale of the stupid action of the 
savage who barters away his best possession, the 
hunting ground of his fathers, for a trinket. Life 
first, says the great teacher, and things after- 
wards. Things are made for life and not life 
for things. What is the use of existing at all 
unless a life is to be built thereon, a life that is 
strong, purposeful, useful, and unselfish. What 
this generation needs to learn almost above every- 
thing is that the profit that makes life worth the 
effort is moral and not material, that it is not 
something to act as blinders about our eyes to 
keep down our nervousness that we need, but 

* Bishop Charles D. Williams. 



NEED OF A TRUE ESTIMATE 133 

escape into the will of God by the door of truth 
and unselfish devotion that is revealed in the life 
and message of Jesus. 

In our judgments of the importance of out- 
ward conditions for the unfoldment of life there 
is need of a true estimate of values. It is com- 
monly fancied that what is needed for the mani- 
festation of superior qualities and graces is su- 
perior conditions, and it is confidently believed 
that if these were supplied a degree of excel- 
lence might be exemplified that is not possible 
otherwise. What very many fail to realize is that 
in the long run it is a consecrated purpose that 
counts for most in the development of a life, and 
in the building of a character, that man does not 
live by bread alone, that the springs of life are 
within, and that with the right moral outlook 
even the most cramped and meager conditions 
are sufficient to discipline the life into absolute 
worth and excellence. History has recorded the 
fact that the common and modest daisy was a 
sufficient theme to secure for Robert Burns a 
place among the immortal bards of history. An 
old wooden shoe with a single string stretched 
upon it was all the instrument that was needed 
by Paganinni to demonstrate the gifts of a mas- 
ter musician. A bit of canvas only a few 
inches square was ample space and means for 



134 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

Raphael to prove to all the generations that he 
was the prince of painters. As superior intellect 
manifests itself in the use it makes of ordinary 
opportunities and means, so in the moral realm, 
the use that is made of such conditions as lie 
within our reach, however meager or common- 
place, reveals the quality of the soul. The com- 
mon toil and drudgery, the common care and re- 
sponsibility, the common lot and sphere of the 
average man, are the best kind of soil, if we only 
knew it, in which to grow a soul and to develop 
a character. 

''The heart it hath its own estate. 

The mind it hath its wealth untold. 
It needs not fortune to he great, 

While there's a coin surpassing gold. 

'Tis not the house that honor makes, 

True honor is a thing divine. 
It is the mind precedence takes 

It is the spirit makes the shrine." 

It is worthy of note that the life which in ex- 
cellence and goodness excells all others, for 
nearly thirty years in its outer aspects at least, 
was characterized only by the ordinary and com- 
monplace. Is not this the carpenter? Yes, that 



NEED OF A TRUE ESTIMATE 13S 

is the beautiful fact that it was in the Nazareth 
of the world's common lot that the world's great- 
est life grew up. There were no dazzling epi- 
sodes, no striking situations, no tragic sorrows, 
nothing marvelous or uncommon. There was 
just the humdrum of the common place with 
which every life is familiar, but at the end of 
thirty years Jesus emerged from these tame and 
insignificant conditions with a moral splendor 
such as man had never seen, and of which man 
had never dreamed. There is nothing in history 
that is more impressive than the fact that in the 
midst of scenes and experiences that the average 
man would regard as intolerably narrow and 
petty, Jesus grew into that supreme character 
which commands the admiration and reverence 
of mankind. 

In our judgments of what constitutes essen- 
tial devotion there is need of a true estimate of 
values. "Seekest thou great things for thyself — 
seek them not." Great things, conspicuous situa- 
tions, dazzling outward conditions are unneces- 
sary for the attainment of great character, and 
they are unnecessary for the direction of the life 
in useful and glorifying service. The discov- 
eries of science which have given distinction to 
this age have taught as much about the infinitely 
great and the infinitely small, and perhaps the 



136 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

greatest lesson of science is that we must recog- 
nize the infinitely great in the infinitely small. 
''The microscope reveals the glory of God as truly 
as the telescope. The most minute and apparently 
insignificant of God's works reveals the same 
thoroughness and care as the most gigantic. The 
commonplace dewdrop rivals the splendor of the 
diamond. The wing of the moth is as truly 
marvelous as the wing of the golden eagle. The 
bubble on the surface of the stream duplicates 
the grace and glory of the firmanent." All this 
contains a needed lesson, for us. Because of a 
false estimate of values we miss the glory which 
lies in the humble, unassuming, and self-effacing 
ways of service while we sigh for. what is splen- 
did, showy, and romantic. "When you dip a cup 
of water from the ocean it seems as if the blue 
had all disappeared, but in point of fact it is 
there in the cup just the same as in the ocean, 
only it requires a finer eye to see it." Thus it is 
that the glory seems to disappear from the 
ordinary, and obscure acts of service. As God 
reveals his devotion in the small and common 
things, so we can reveal ours. We can prove 
our earnestness, and consecration in petty sac- 
rifice as truly as at the martyr's stake; we 
can show our courage as much by witnessing 
for the good* in daily life as by witnessing be- 



NEED OF A TRUE ESTIMATE 137 

fore kings, and we can prove our patience as 
truly by smiling away the worry of common days 
as by bowing before some bitter tragedy. All 
the generosity of the philanthropist, all the zeal 
of the evangelist, all the courage of the martyr, 
and all the love of the seraph, may be felt and 
exhibited by humble people in the humblest ways 
of life. The glory may not be so apparent, but 
nevertheless it is there to those who have eyes 
to see and hearts to understand. 

And in our judgments of what makes life 
truly happy there is need of a clear estimate of 
values. The craving for happiness is universal, 
and that the soul was meant for happiness is 
shown by the instinct for it, an instinct that 
Jesus ever took for granted and sought to de- 
velop. Gloom even in the ascetic morality 
was regarded as of the nature of mortal sin. 
"Enjoy thy existence," says Jean Paul, "more 
than thy manner of existence, and let the dear- 
est object of thy consciousness be this conscious- 
ness itself." It is this capacity for happiness 
that differentiates us from the lower orders of 
life, that marks our humanity and that keeps 
us ever facing Godward. But experience shows 
that happiness is too commonly associated with 
the outward states. Men fail to realize to what 
an enormous extent they have their happiness in 



138 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

their own hands. We sigh and strain for great 
things that are to make us happy and content, 
and all the while we miss the sweet and satis- 
fying joy of common and familiar things which 
are within our reach. We complain because we 
cannot gaze upon distant wonders, when if we 
understood it we might catch a glimpse of 
heaven in a common flower and listen to the 
music of the spheres in the humming of a bee. 
Here inside of us, is the force that can drive 
away the clouds, a power that can call up good 
thoughts and dispel bad ones, which can concen- 
trate on the "lighted" side of things, which can 
fall back on gracious memories as a refuge 
from evil, which, in a word, can make its own 
weather, winning through the thickest clouds to 
the blue sky and the shining sun. Simply to 
reahze the significance of **the great within" is 
to find that the conditions all about us, that are 
in the reach of all, are as full of "beauty and 
blessing as a jeweler's apron is full of gold dust." 

The great need of our age is to realize that 
a man's life "consisteth not in the abundance 
of the things that he possesseth,'* but in the ca- 
pacity to appreciate and to absorb the divine 
that is in the simple elemental things of life 
that lie on every side and within the reach of all. 

Suppose the case of two men who walk 



NEED OF A TRUE ESTIMATE 139 

through a great conservatory; the one has the 
title deeds in his pocket, but he is utterly desti- 
tute of aesthetic feeling and cultivation; the 
other man doesn't even own a flower bed, but 
he has the capacity to appreciate, every shade of 
color, every breath of fragrance. Which man 
really enjoys the conservatory, the man who con- 
trols it or the man who is able to appreciate it? 
So the real enjoyment and blessedness of Hfe 
must ever lie, not merely in outward control, but 
in the capacity to see, appreciate and under- 
stand. Given that capacity the means of a 
happy life are On every side, in one's own home 
however modest, in one's own possessions how- 
ever meager, in one's own friendships however 
humble, in all the common world. "Seekest thou 
great things for thyself, seek them not," but 
"seek ye first the kingdom of God and his right- 
eousness and all these things shall be added unto 
you." There is a whole kingdom to be sought, 
won, and enjoyed in a common flower, in a com- 
mon friendship, or in a common day. 

*'Will you seek far off? You surely come hack 

at last. 
In things best known to you, finding the best or 

as good as the hest^ 
In folks nearest to you, findinq the sweetest, 

strongest, lovingest. 



t4o A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

Happiness, knowledge, not in another place, hut 
this place, not 
For another hour, but this hour." 



Freely ye have received, freely give. — ^Jesus. 

It is only with renunciation that life properly 
speaking, can be said to begin. In a valiant suf^ 
fering for others, not in a slothful making others 
suffer for us, did nobleness ever lie. — Carlyle. 

/ expect to pass through this life but once. If 
therefore, there is any kindness I can show, or 
any good thing I can do to any fellow being, let 
me do it now, let me not defer or neglect it, for I 
shall not pass this way again. — Hegeman. 



142 



CHAPTER XII. 

THE SENSE OF MORAL DEBT. 

The inevitable accompaniment of our nature 
at its best is the sense of moral debt. As men 
rise in the moral scale^ as spiritual character is 
realized they feel themselves laid hold of by an 
"imperious demand for a higher helpfulness," 
they recognize that a great account is laid up 
against them, which they are morally obliged, as 
far as possible, to repay; that "we are where we 
are and what we are because of the boundless 
benefactions which have been bestowed upon us 
by invisible donors, and because of the measure- 
less service that has been rendered us by invisible 
helpers." 

The word of Christ to His disciples, "Freely 
ye have received, freely give," when broadly in- 
terpreted is an incisive and impressive statement 
of a principle of grace and of corresponding 
debt that is as comprehensive as human life. 
Rightly understood it requires us to examine into 
the process by which all things have come to 
us, and not to take them as a matter of course, 
143 



144 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

Merely to begin to do this is to deal a death blow 
at the self-absorbed and self -centered spirit. The 
deeper we look into things the more we recog- 
nize that everything of worth that we possess 
represents a mighty cost, and has come to us 
richly stored with human life, and if we have a 
human heart within us we shall want to make 
some return for what we have received. 

Beginning on the lowest plane, with the ordi- 
nary material benefits and comforts of life, with 
the things we eat, wear, spend, and use, what a 
gospel of grace and debt is daily preached by 
these benefits. No earnest person who brings 
himself to reflect upon the material comforts of 
life, who remembers what they represent in the 
way of human sacrifice, and what they have cost 
to those who have toiled day and night amidst 
every sort of exposure, and hardship, in the fog, 
and in the tempest, on the storm tossed sea, in 
the lonely forest, in the damp and gaseous at- 
mosphere of the coal mine, and amidst a hun- 
dred other conditions where there is the smallest 
spiritual aid and the smallest chance of morality, 
can fail to experience a profound sense of moral 
debt, and to be stirred with a new mighty im- 
pulse to make some return. 

If we reflect upon the liberties that we pos- 
sess and how they have reached us what a gospel 



THE SENSE OF MORAL DEBT 14S 

of grace and debt they preach. It is said of the 
poet Keats that when he walked in a garden of 
roses and saw the ground all covered with pink 
petals he exclaimed, "Next year the roses should 
be very red." It is said by Virgil that when 
^neas tore the bough from off the myrtle tree 
that the tree exuded blood. These expressions 
represent the poet's way of saying that civiliza- 
tion is a growth that is nourished, not by water 
nor by snow, but by the blood of patriots and 
prophets. We are prone to accept our liberties 
as a matter of course, as if they came to us like 
the sunshine and the fresh air, but when we re- 
flect upon what they have cost, and remember 
the human life that is stored up in them we can- 
not fail to be moved with the sense of moral 
debt. 

The age seems remote when the criticism of a 
baron meant the confiscation of the peasant's 
lands, the criticism of the pope meant the dun- 
geon, and the criticism of a king meant death, 
but to win the freedom to think, to speak and to 
act has required the most God-like heroism and 
devotion. "From Marathon and Salamis, from 
the Netherlands under William the Silent, from 
the British sailors who fired the Spanish Ar- 
mada, from Cromweirs Ironsides at Marston 
Moor, from the Plains of Abraham, from 



146 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIME5 

Bunker Hill and Bennington, from Shiloh, Get- 
tysburg, the Wilderness and Spotsylvania Court 
House, and from all the brave souls of all the 
world, who have risked their lives for freedom 
and for law, for justice and humanity have come 
the liberties that we possess to-day/'* 

Take once more the religious faith which both 
in its content and in the way it has come to us 
represents such a tremendous debt. ''The human 
consciousness is aware of a secret inflow upon 
its upper side.'* We recognize the presence of 
a Love that inspires, comforts, helps, and clings 
to us forever. 

"O Love that will not let me go, 
I rest my weary soul on Thee; 
I give TJiee back the life I owe, 
That in Thine oceans depth its How 
May richer, fuller be. 

Strengthened by this faith men have ventured 
every risk, they have endured every hardship to 
share their faith with others, and to make it a 
common possession. Through the suflferings of a 
great company of witnesses and martyrs who 
received "mockings and scourgings, yea, more- 
over of bonds and imprisonment," who were 

♦President Hyde. 



THE SENSE OF MORAL DEBT 147 

stoned, sawn asunder, slain with the sword, or 
who were driven into exile and "went about in 
sheep skins, goat skins, being destitute, afflicted 
or ill-treated,"' we trace our faith back to him 
who endured the cross. It cost the tragedy of 
Calvary that for the God of the Pharisee we 
might have the God of the meek and lowly, and 
for a God who is a tyrant we might have a God 
who is a father; that for cruelty there might be 
kindness, for lust purity, for oppression liberty, 
and that to all men and all times divine forgive- 
ness might be free for the penitent, divine com- 
fort for the sad, divine strength for the weak, 
and the kingdom of divine righteousness for the 
pure in heart. 

Now the really great souls have never failed 
to read the lesson of these facts, and they have 
never ceased to feel the sense of moral debt. 
The messengers of the cross who, like Paul, have 
sailed across unknown seas and penetrated to 
the heart of unknown countries that they might 
share their heart treasures, have felt themselves 
driven forward in the face of every sort of hard- 
ship and peril by this sense of moral debt. Great 
reformers like Wilberforce, Garrison, Phillips, 
Sumner and Brown, who confronted furious 
slave drivers and endured every form of insult 
and abuse that they might deal a death blow to 



148 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

the iniquitous traffic in human flesh, great phil- 
anthropists Hke John Howard who went into 
the prisons of Europe when they were veritable 
pest houses in order that he might cleanse them 
from disease and wipe from justice a polluting 
stain, and the high souled women like Mary- 
Ware, Frances E. Willard, Clara Barton, and 
Lady Henry Somerset who have led the cru- 
sade for the new womanhood and who have 
igiven a new sanctity to womankind throughout 
the world were inspired and strengthened and 
held to their God-appointed tasks by the sense 
of moral debt. 

Something of what these great hearts have 
felt we also ought to feel. A huge account is 
laid up against us as well. All that makes life 
worth living, our material comforts, our liberties, 
our freedom to think, speak, and act, our intel- 
lectual ideals and culture, our religious faith and 
hopes all represent a tremendous debt, and if 
we have any real nobility within us we shall want 
to make some return, we shall talce account of 
the fact that these precious benefactions are not 
simply for ourselves, but for the future, and 
we are in duty bound to pass thern on, not 
merely as we have received them, but with the 
added increment that we should contribute as 
well. The thought of squandering these price- 



THE SENSE OF MORAL DEBT T49 

less gifts upon ourselves, of using them to take 
advantage of others' weakness, or to profit by 
their loss will be increasingly abhorent through 
the years. 

From all this emerges the question as to the 
form that our contribution should take. The 
chief lesson for us to grasp at this point is that 
the quality of our service depends upon the qual- 
ity of our life. The worth of our contribution 
will be conditioned by our character. There is 
an old axiom which declares that doing follows 
being and is according to being, and there is 
no truth that is more clearly attested by the whole 
history of man. It was the character of Jesus 
more than any work that he wrought, and the 
character of Paul more than the voyages he 
made, that have been through the centuries such 
an inspiration, and such a valuable possession of 
man. It has been said of a distinguished 
teacher that because of his own goodness he 
made goodness easier for other people. That is 
the only adequate return that we can make, it is 
the only return that measures up to the demand 
upon us. The type of goodness that has been 
the scoff of strong men will not answer, and the 
type of goodness that is merely respectable and 
not sacrificing, that is negative in quality and 
counts itself good simply because it is not bad, 



150 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

will not answer. The sanctity of the young man 
of the New Testament, who came to the Master, 
saying to him, — "What shall I do to enter into 
the kingdom of God," was of this character; 
when Jesus put him to the test he was found 
wanting; when he was asked to sacrifice he went 
away sorrowfully. Nothing but a righteousness 
of the self-sacrificing and self-giving type will 
measure up to the account that is laid up against 
us. . 

What every department of life is crying for 
and what the world needs most is the kind of in- 
dividual consecration that is best described by 
the word "Christliness." It is when the quality 
of individual character declines that social con- 
ditions become intolerable. For the past decade 
or more, under the leadership of a few brave 
souls the nation has been making a desperate ef- 
fort to bring rapacity, selfishness, and greed 
under the restraint of law and to keep the ways 
of freedom open to the many as well as to the 
few, and the lesson that has been impressed 
anew upon us is that law of itself can accomplish 
little. The trouble is that it cannot reach the 
inner motives. ''What is needed at the present 
moment, is not so much a better system of laws, 
pr a better economic or social order, it is a better 



THE SENSE OF MORAL DEBT 151 

morality, and a higher type of individual conse- 
cration and character."* 

"The supreme directness, the triumphant sim- 
plicity of Jesus as the restorer of humanity to its 
true order and the bringer of a new kingdom 
into the world, came from the clearness with 
which he saw that the world's chief trouble 
and man's deepest need lie in the inner life. He 
wasted no strength in polishing the outside of the 
cups and platters on which man's exterior wants 
are served. He spent no time in whitening 
sepulchers. He knew that the seat of real good- 
ness and permanent happiness and divine har- 
mony must be in the inner life. There can be no 
real empire of peace unless this deepest region is 
reached. There must be no nook or corner or 
crevice of man's life left unexplored, unsubdued, 
unreconciled, no lurking place of rebellion, no 
fountain of discord, no 

*'Little rift within the lute, 
That by and by will make the music mute. 
And ever widening slowly silence all!' 

The kingdom must go into the center and 
down to the bottom of personality and work 
from within outward, and from below upward."t 

* Washington Gladden. f Henry Van Dyke. 



IS2 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

Such being the case the only adequate con- 
tribution that we can make, the only return that 
measures up to the demand upon us is that of a 
worthy character. Failure at this point spells 
failure for society. It means to squander the 
priceless gifts that have come to us so richly 
stored with the life blood of our fellows. For us 
to live in selfishness, notwithstanding the cross 
of Jesus, and in spite of all those who have died 
in order to win for us the life of love, and serv- 
ice, is to render null and void as far as we are 
able all this high-souled devotion of the centuries, 
to squander our priceless treasures, and to prove 
ourselves everlastingly unworthy. 

"Materialism, barren well-being, the idolatry 
of the flesh and the I, of the temporal and of 
mammon, are these to be the goal of our efforts? 
I do not believe it,'' cries Amiel. "The ideal of 
humanity is something different and higher. A 
republic of souls will arise in which far beyond 
the region of mere right and sordid utility, 
beauty, devotion, holiness, heroism, enthusiasm, 
the extraordinary and the infinite shall have a 
worship and an abiding city." 



[ 1 



And if ye love them that love you zvhat thank 
have yef — Jesus. 

A loving heart exhales sweet odors like an 
alabaster box. It pours forth joy like a sweet 
harp. It Hashes beauty like casket gems. It 
cheers like a winter's lire. It carries sweet stimu- 
lus like returning sunshine. — Newell Dwight 

HiLLIS. 



154 



CHAPTER XIII. 

THE SYMPATHY THAT PERFECTS LIFE. 

There is nothing that offers such a challenge 
to Christian devotion as the narrowness of 
the human spirit. The idea of regarding the 
entire human family as the subject of friendly 
concern, as essentially one with ourselves, and 
that independently of race, class, sect, or 
creed, is one that advances slowly, although it 
unquestionably does advance. Only the great- 
est souls like Confucius, Guatama, and Jesus 
have caught this idea and been swayed by it. For 
the most part it has been absent from the ordi- 
nary brain. Even the most cultured thinkers of 
Antiquity simply could not conceive of a state 
of society in which there are no aliens, or out- 
siders. With perfect complacency, both the po- 
litical and religious writers of the ancient world 
base their ideal state upon slavery, and **the 
principle that it is not contrary to nature or the 
laws of God to despoil him whom it is a virtue 
to despoil goes unchallenged." 

It must be admitted that for century after 
155 



IS6 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

century the ideals of Christendom did not seem 
in this respect to improve greatly. The exclu- 
siveness of the pagan world was recast in the 
Christian doctrine of election, and was carried 
into Christian theories and conceptions of gov- 
ernment. Augustine's "City of God" is a virtual 
denial of human solidarity, because it is based 
upon the idea that there are two kinds of men, 
the elect and the nonelect, the blessed and the 
cursed. At the Reformation, and for centuries 
after Catholics and Protestants hated each other, 
and thought of each other as reprobates both 
in this life and in the life to come, and the dismal 
story of Christian intolerance as manifested in the 
bloody ferocities of the Crusaders, in the ran- 
corous hate that was poured upon the Moslems, 
in the bloody reprisals extorted by the Christian 
powers of Europe from the Jews, in the bar- 
barities of the Inquisition, and in many other 
ways goes to show how the separation of the an- 
cient world was carried into Christian modes 
of thought, and found recrudescence in the 
spirit and practices of Christian peoples. 

Notwithstanding the manifest enlargements 
of spirit which have taken place in our own day, 
and in spite of the fact that "the brain of hu- 
manity has risen to the height of an entirely new 
view and is conscious of a fresh inner sense," 



SYMPATHY THAT PERFECTS LIFE IS7 

the sense of human oneness, there is still much 
of the old restriction that survives to contradict, 
and to nullify what was most characteristic in 
the spirit of Jesus. The instinct that expressed 
itself in the brutal impulse to attack, to injure, 
and even to destroy the representatives of other 
points of view and other faiths has all but van- 
ished from the Christian mind, but the attitude 
which has taken its place, however encouraging 
it may be to those who believe that the essential 
unity and brotherhood of the race must eventu- 
ally prove itself, is hardly such as can be de- 
scribed in terms of the mind of Christ. Active 
persecution in the form of bodily injury is no 
longer possible in Christian lands, but all too 
often the spirit of isolation, self-withdrawal, and 
even cool contempt is left. 'The Jews have no 
dealings with the Samaritans." That is a form 
of intolerance that is more subtle because less 
obvious, more courteous and more refined, but 
not less un-Christly than the other. It is the 
form that intolerance most frequently takes in 
an age like this, that prides itself upon its gen- 
eral culture, and intellectual breadth. The truth 
that needs to be driven home today is that 
active persecution is not the only contradiction 
of the mind of Christ. "Simply to be ignored 



iS8 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

may be even more bitter, and rancorous than to 
be persecuted." 

The extent to which the spirit of selfish and 
cruel separatism may exist in conjunction with 
an otherwise rational mind and a high standard 
of morality was indicated for all time in the 
matchless story of the wounded stranger, and the 
priest and Levite who came and looked and 
passed by on the other side. That the spirit of 
passing by on the other side, of looking with 
more or less contempt, of leaving others to their 
fate with scarcely a passing regret still survives 
to a marked extent in our own faith is scarcely 
open to doubt. That this spirit exists to a less 
extent than in other years is true enough, but 
that it should exist at all in the Christian faith 
of today is just ground for reproach. 

The summons of the Christian faith is to a 
spirit that is without restrictions, and to a men- 
tal attitude that is uncircumscribed. In marked 
contrast to the limitations that fettered his own 
age and that has bound his followers is the 
mind of Jesus. "He had a view so broad, an 
insight so deep, a love so patient, so tolerant, so 
comprehending that he was able to see and to 
revere beneath all the abberations of human na- 
ture the common soul of humanity, the imper- 
ishable seed of God." 



SYMPATHY THAT PERFECTS LIFE 159 

From a background that was characterized by 
separateness and scorn of others the figure of 
Jesus emerged, wearing the stainless mantle of 
purity and peace. "There was no trace of con- 
temporary bitterness upon him, no bounds of 
traditional narrowness to impede the freedom of 
his movements. It seems wonderful when we 
look upon him and contrast him with the time 
from which he sprang. He is like the light 
against the darkness, and like the radiant bow 
against the threatening clouds. He called him- 
self the Son of Man, a designation that implies a 
wholly unrestricted attitude. He felt himself to 
be in and of the entire race. The nation, the 
family, the mother that bore him he acknowl- 
edged, and loved, but not in a sense that made of 
others aliens, or less the flesh of his flesh, and 
the bone of his bone. The large friendliness of 
his attitude was beautiful to look upon." He 
denied the right of sympathy to be exclusive. 
He protested against the protrusion of narrow- 
ness into love. 'Tf ye love them which love yoil 
what thank have ye." Sympathy was to him a 
living warmth of soul that makes the whole 
world kin. He denied the right of worship to 
be exclusive. His disciples were commanded to 
look at life not merely in its personal aspect but 
rather in its collective. When they enter the 



i6o A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

inner chamber to present themselves before the 
great searcher of hearts they are to remember 
their fellows. "After this manner therefore 
pray ye, — Our Father who art in heaven." They 
are to carry into worship a spirit that is wholly 
unrestricted. He denied even to grief the right 
to be selfish. "Suffer me first to go and bury 
my father," said a would-be disciple, and Jesus 
answered, "Let the dead bury their dead, but 
go thou and preach the kingdom of God." That 
was simply his way of asserting for all time the 
principle that social claims must supersede even 
private sorrows. His own conduct is the best 
illustration of the principle. In the tragic hour 
of Calvary when his heart was breaking with 
the sorrows of rejected love, he allowed his medi- 
tations to be interrupted thrice. Once it was in 
order to make provisions for the future comfort 
of his mother, once that he might answer the ap- 
peal to the dying malefactor by his side, and once 
that he might pray for his foreign murderers. 
"Father, forgive them, for they know not what 
they do." He loved in death as he had loved in 
life the world that lay outside of what men call 
true religion. Such was the sympathy of Jesus. 
The secret of Christ's largeness was his ap- 
prehension of God as Father, whose love is like 
sunshine that falls with glad warmth, and equal 



SYMPATHY THAT PERFECTS LIFE i6l 

diffusion of light upon all his children, the evil 
and the good, the thankful and the unthankful, 
the worthy and the unworthy. With such a 
conception of God the notion of an elect race, a 
peculiar people, or favored classes and indi- 
viduals became impossible for Jesus, and it be- 
comes impossible for any man who has really 
caught the Master's vision of the Father, and 
has looked upon the world with his insight. "The 
conception of the Divine fatherhood is the grand 
leveler of ranks and heirarchies, it is the charter 
of fraternity, and the prophecy of peace and 
good will among men. When we say our 
Father whom do we include in the word? Nay, 
whom do we dare exclude? It sweeps us all in, 
it gathers into one waiting company the king and 
the beggar, the philosopher and the hind, the 
saint and the sinner. It confesses the parentage, 
and dignity and the worth of every human soul 
and cries in the simple words of Tiny Tim, "God 
bless us every one." What a word this is that 
reaches up so high and down so low and forth so 
far, the length and breadth and height of which 
we so feebly understand. If God is Father, men 
are brothers, and unbrotherliness, in any sphere 
or relationship is the real and deadly atheism of 
life."* 

*Dr. Washington Gladden, 



I62 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

The apprehension of God as Father inevitably 
issues in sympathy. Those outside the charmed 
circle of race, family, or social class are seen to 
be human beings like ourselves, with needs which 
we are bound to consider, and claims which we 
are bound to respect. They have tastes, powers, 
and emotions like our own; they suffer and en- 
dure and have needs, and wherever there is need 
there is obligation. The one cannot exist with- 
out the other. Whatever evil force or influence 
that in a small or large way touches any life is a 
legitimate concern of ours. No man, who is a 
true man, can say of this or that evil, it does not 
concern me, and remain true. An evil that 
threatens or hinders any one is a concern of ours. 
The age old question, "Am I my brother's 
keeper?" has been answered forever in the affir- 
mative, and those who have looked at the world 
through the eyes of Jesus, and with the sympathy 
of Jesus will never challenge the answer. 

Sympathy lends vision, it enables us to see and 
to interpret other lives in their deep lying possi- 
bilities, and not merely in their artificial dispari- 
ties. It enables us to separate the sinner from 
his sin. The sin remains abhorrent, but 
the man of Christly sympathy cannot hate or 
despise the sinner. There are two ways, as some 
one declares, of regarding human life. There 



SVMPATHY -THAT PERFECTS LIFE 163 

are the microscopic and the telescopic methods. 
Selfishness employs the former, it looks through 
a lighted lense and beholds all the weakness and 
the imperfection of men and it says, "This is hu- 
manity." So it is, but it is only one view, the 
narrow and contracted view. The truth is that 
we can never see our fellows aright or judge 
them as we ought until we take the larger view, 
the telescopic view. Men must be judged in re- 
lation to eternity as well as to time. "We can- 
not even judge a grain of sand aright, until we 
perceive it as one in substance with the starry 
worlds which whirl above us, we cannot judge a 
raindrop aright until we see it lifted into the 
clouds and woven into rainbows, and we cannot 
judge a human life aright until we see it under- 
neath the stars, and in relation to the eternities," 
until we see it in the light of its possibilities and 
not merely in the light of its present limitations. 
Jesus revealed the larger view when he went into 
the hut of the fishermen in order to find Apostles 
for his faith. Who but the great Teacher with 
his far reaching vision would think of searching 
in the huts of fishermen to find apostles? He 
saw and measured the lives of these fishermen 
not simply in relation to the immediate and the 
present, but in relation to the future and the 
eternal 



i64 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

Our own lives also are fulfilled by sympathy. 
It is the eagle wings by which the character is 
able to mount to its highest level. "No man 
liveth to himself." We are set down in the 
midst of other lives. They have need of us and 
we have need of them. It is one of the curious 
anomalies of history that men have repeatedly 
tried to serve God and to achieve goodness by 
repudiating social obligations, and fleeing from 
social relationships. The truth is that to accept 
these relationships, and to extend them as far as 
possible, and to enrich them with love and serv- 
ice, constitutes the supreme opportunity for the 
furtherance of character. "What health is to the 
body, what sweetness is to the lark's song, what 
perfume is to the rose, that is sympathy to cul- 
ture and to character. Drunkenness and glut- 
tony have not more power to blear the eyes than 
has cold indifference to degrade the soul and 
to warp the character. When the classic writer 
tells us that his hero escaped safely from an en- 
chanted palace, only to suffer injury from his 
unfaithfulness to a friend he wishes us to know 
that it is easier to recover from the poison of 
Circe's cup than to escape the effects of dis- 
obedience to the laws of God." Sympathy is a 
law, and not merely a matter of caprice or im- 
pulse. It is a law of God that is universal. 



SYMPATHY THAT PERFECTS LIFE 165 

*Just as summer fulfills all ripeness and growth 
for seed, and root, and tree, so it is that sym- 
pathy fulfills all laws for self, and man and the 
all loving God. It enriches and elevates every- 
thing that is truly admirable in life. Whatever 
is praiseworthy in courage, or endurance, what- 
ever has firmness and sweetness, and nobility, 
whatever belongs to the hero and the patriot, 
whatever belongs to the seer and the scholar, all 
these are united and carried upward into the 
sweetness and purity of life by sympathy, until 
the perfect man seems to have been strengthened 
and inspired as with a presence. 

For this is the glory of love 

And this the gracious power 
Touching the tender heart 

To leaf and flower. 
Till not the flower alone 

Beneath its radiant light. 
But human lives as well 

Grow pure and bright. 



Bear ye one another^ s burdens and so fulfill the 
law of Christ. — Paul. 

When the Church reaches once more the tem- 
per of the first disciples; when it offers to men 
what the first believers offered its great monu- 
ment will have come again. It has centuries of 
lost time to make up. It has to retrace long 
leagues of wandering in order to get back to the 
track. We need not trouble about the revelation 
of truth. That is streaming in upon us from adl 
quarters. What we want is to enter again into 
the gospel's open secret. — Mr. Brierley. 



l66 



CHAPTER XIV. 

THE FELLOWSHIP OF SYMPATHY AND OF UPWAKD 
STRIVING. 

The question as to what is the matter with 
the Church is all important. That it commands 
a widespread interest is shown by the fact that 
the editor of a popular magazine has thought fit, 
within a month or two, to bring forward a sym- 
posium upon the subject. The contributors are 
leading churchmen who represent nearly all the 
more important branches of the Church. They 
are a unit in thinking that there is something 
amiss with the Church, but they are by no means 
agreed as to what it is, or as to the remedy that 
is to be applied. To one the chief trouble is the 
failure of many to realize their duty to the 
Church ; to another it is the growth of organiza- 
tions outside which entrench upon the preroga- 
tives of the Church, and absorb the time and 
strength that ought to be given to the Church; 
to another it is lack of spirituality and aggres- 
siveness; to another lack of ethical earnestness 
upon the part of the Church; to another the 
J67 



i68 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

Church's lack of interest in vital issues, and to 
still another the Church's loss of touch with the 
needy and the helpless. 

In point of fact are these not symptoms rather 
than causes? Is not the prevailing tendency to 
look at this problem from too small an angle? 
In much of the current discussion of the subject 
there is evident failure to realize that the ques- 
tion, what is the matter with the Church ? is one 
that involves its ideal and its history from the 
time of its inception. At the root of the 
Church's present difficulties is its ideal, its con- 
ception of itself and its functions that it has as- 
siduously cultivated for centuries. What did 
Jesus have in mind for his Church? What di- 
rection did he give it? How in the light of 
Christ should the Church define itself? What 
ends should it seek to realize? By what test 
should it condition its fellowship? These are 
considerations which simply cannot be ignored 
in any satisfactory effort to deal with the present 
problem of the Church. When we have come 
to understand what Christ really desired, and 
have sufficient experience of the joy of his serv- 
ice to be willing to make the sacrifice that he 
demanded, then shall we discover the real diffi- 
culty with the Church and where the true remedy 
lies. 



THE FELLOWSHIP OF SYMPATHY 169 

It is true that the question as to how Christ 
thought of the Church, and how his immediate 
disciples conceived it is not by any means new. 
The minds of Christian people for century after 
century have turned backward to the early 
church with a kind of helpless yearning. It has 
been felt that the early Christians possessed a 
secret that was somehow lost to succeeding 
generations, but the interest for the most part 
has been of a sectarian nature, to gain support 
for some polity, dogma, or traditional usage. To 
all such questions the history of the early Church 
vouchsafes but a meager reply, or it answers in a 
tone which clearly shows that such considera- 
tions were deemed of but secondary importance. 
It is neither from the standpoint of the dogma- 
tist nor the traditionalist that we can rightly in- 
terpret the early Church or enter into its secret, 
but only from the standpoint of an impartial and 
sympathetic inquiry. 

Such inquiry, in the judgment of the writer, 
makes it clear that Jesus organized his disciples 
as a school of helpers, as a brotherhood of a new 
life, as a fellowship of sympathy and of upward 
striving. One who looks carefully at the early 
Church cannot fail to see that its idea of itself 
differed profoundly from that which came to 
be cherished in later centuries. It was a guild of 



170 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

sympathy, the aim of which was to spread a new 
kind of Hfe, rather than to organize and to ex- 
tend an institution. It was the "warm heart, the 
gentle tongue, the ministering hand" that were 
the true test and badge of fellowship in the early 
Church, rather than subscription to a creed. In 
fact, there was no doctrinal test at all as a condi- 
tion of fellowship, and there was no moral test 
except the evidence of a new spirit of life. Those 
who were weak in the faith were received gladly, 
with the confidence that their new spirit, and 
point of view would eventually issue in Christ- 
like conduct. The early disciples met together 
in affectionate family groups, and when they 
broke bread in remembrance of Christ it was of 
the nature of a simple family meal, and nothing 
that resembled the elaborate and artificial ad- 
ministration of the sacrament to-day. The dis- 
ciples spoke of themselves as having been made 
alive in Christ, as having become new creatures, 
and they felt themselves bound to one another 
by a new spiritual kinship that was stronger than 
ties of blood. Their method of imparting their 
faith was that of personal contact on the part of 
the entire body, more than through formal 
preaching, by a few individuals who had been 
specially set apart. Their worship was of the 
most simple character. Such rites as they ob- 



THE FELLOWSHIP OF SYMPATHY 171 

served were both simple and naturaL Such 
Church officials as they had were not sharply 
distinguished from the rest of the brethren. The 
early Church was preeminently a fellowship of 
sympathy and of upward striving, and its suc- 
cess was unquestionably one of the most won- 
derful things of history. The life of this com- 
munity of believers represented something that 
swept them forward in spite of themselves, and 
made them a conquering body. 

But this early simplicity did not long continue. 
By the end of the first century it had begun to 
disappear, and two centuries later instead of the 
simple fraternal idea of the Christian body we 
find the institutional idea fully devoloped. 'The 
upper room, where the family group had broken 
bread together, had become the gorgeous Basil- 
ica, the elder had become the pontiff, the simple 
communion meal had become a sacramental 
function. Instead of the little companies bound 
together in affection, we find the great congrega- 
tions strangers to one another, instead of dis- 
ciples it now embraces the population of the 
empire from Caesar down. Instead of a band of 
brethren sharing their possessions with one an- 
other, we have a Church with imperial endow- 
ments. It has a hierarchy, liturgies, canons, 
creeds, disciplines, machinery for propagandism, 



112 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

and diplomacy. In a word the society which 
passed out of sight a spiritual brotherhood re- 
appeared a religious empire."* 

This conception of the Church as an institu- 
tion based upon a dogmatic foundation, in which 
the creed, the ritual and the ecclesiastic hold 
sway, and which is to be expanded until it be- 
comes universal, rather than as a brotherhood 
of a new life, a voluntary fellowship of sympathy 
and of upward striving, has in various forms per- 
sisted until the present. While more in evidence 
in the Catholic branches of the Church, it has also 
been shared to a very considerable extent by the 
various Protestant sects. They have all had for 
their aim to organize and to expand an institu- 
tion, rather than to further a new spirit of life. 
Sectarian machinery has been extended and re- 
duplicated until it is hard to imagine a state of 
ingenuousness that is greater than that which 
has come to pass. "Congregations are exhorted 
weekly to labor and give in order to carry the 
gospel to those who are in need, and not infre- 
quently their gifts are used to plant a church in 
some community where the gospel has been 
preached for years, and where the Churches are 
already crowding each other." People have been 
exhorted to denominational zeal rather than to 

*Dr. S. D. McConnell. 



THE FELLOWSHIP OF SYMPATHY 173 

sympathy and brotherhood, and the habit of 
reckoning success by numbers has been devel- 
oped until it has become thoroughly fastened 
upon existing Church organizations. 

When the history of the Church from the age 
of Constantine is taken account of, and we re- 
flect upon how the Church in all this period that 
covers more than fifteen centuries has subordi- 
nated life to dogma, brotherhood to the organi- 
zation and extension of an institution, fellow- 
ship and sympathy to sectarian zeal and loyalty, 
we cease to wonder that multitudes of earnest 
and devoted people to-day are profoundly dis- 
satisfied with the situation. "Their quarrel," as 
one writer finds it_, "is not with this Church or 
that one. They hold aloof from them all. But 
they are a kind of men which Christianity has 
produced. They hold Christ in unfeigned rev- 
erence." They may not care much for the defi- 
nition of him which the Churches set forth in 
their creeds. They may not even attempt to de- 
fine him for themselves, but they possess the 
same kind of spirit that was in Christ, and to a 
very marked degree, but they have no use for 
the Church. 

The claim is put forth by a distinguished Ro- 
man Catholic prelate that as yet there is no 
reason to complain of the attitude of Catholic 



174 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

people toward the Church. He points out that in 
the cities the Cathohc Churches are crowded at 
each of the five or six masses offered on Sunday. 
In the rural districts, in good weather and in bad. 
Catholics seldom find any difficulty so great, or 
condition so intolerable as to have to dispense 
with the obligatory attendance at the divine serv- 
ice on Sunday. Nevertheless the careful observer 
does not find that conditions among Catholic 
peoples are as serene and undisturbed as these 
words would seem to indicate. In those coun- 
tries where the authority of Rome is most in 
evidence there is revolt to-day in the hearts of 
multitudes. There is refusal to yield the sub- 
mission that Rome demands. There is a Mod- 
ernist movement within the Catholic Church that 
threatens to reform or to rend it. The attitude 
of passive submission which has hitherto pre- 
vailed among certain classes in reference to the 
Roman communion is clearly changing to-day 
into active impatience and hostility. 

In Protestant communities the movement of 
reaction against the Church has proceeded fur- 
ther because there is a greater sense of freedom 
and independence, and because the Church or- 
ganizations have far less ability to command. 
The place of influence that they once occupied has 
to a very considerable extent been lost. Their 



THE FELLOWSHIP OF SYMPATHY 175 

call to worship appears to be heeded less and 
less. The methods hitherto relied upon to fill the 
Churches are now proving ineffective, and an 
ever increasing number of people who have been 
counted with the Churches are quietly dropping 
away, not so much that they have become hostile, 
as that they have lost interest. All things con- 
sidered, the present is clearly a time of stress 
and strain and humiliation, at least for the Prot- 
estant branch of the Church. Meanwhile a mul- 
titude of people instead of heeding the call to 
worship, are running in breathless haste after 
strange cults that dazzle the eyes of both intelli- 
gent and ignorant with promises of mysterious 
cures, and marvelous wisdom. Organizations of 
many kinds that pretend to stand for fraternity 
and sympathy are thriving and spring up. The 
idea of service appears to have taken strong hold 
on the public mind. Vast sums are devoted to 
fraternal objects. The parable of the good Sa- 
maritan has become more real in the social life 
than in any previous generation. Benevolent 
agencies and institutions flourish, but the Church 
is neglected by an ever increasing number. It 
is said that in one of our American cities a new 
Y. M. C. A. building, three stories high, has re- 
cently been erected in the same block in which a 
Church building stands with the doors nailed 



176 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

fast. In another city a splendid Church build- 
ing, erected at a great cost, and now virtually 
abandoned, is allowed to go to rack while at the 
distance of a stone's throw is a magnificent hos- 
pital, amply supported by voluntary subscriptions 
and with all of its wards almost constantly oc- 
cupied. These are but acute illustrations of a 
situation that widely prevails. 

The remedy for this situation is "for the 
Church to trace back her stumbling steps to the 
place where the path forked and to start anew, 
to start along a better way." It is in other words 
to re-define itself, to put itself in line again with 
the evident intention of its founder, to make it- 
self what it was in the beginning when it spread 
with such amazing rapidity, exhibited such a 
unique life, was so sure of itself, moved toward 
its purpose with such a wonderful courage, ar- 
rested and held the attention of men in such a 
way as to compel the conviction that the Church 
possessed a secret that they did not have. 

The first step in this direction is to get rid of 
dogmatic restrictions and to leave it to Christ to 
establish his ascendency over men in his own 
way, "by the power of what he is, and of what 
he has done, and not seek to secure that ascen- 
dency beforehand by the imposition of chains of 



THE FELLOWSHIP OF SYMPATHY 177 

our own forging."* Surely, the Christ has a 
right to estabhsh his ascendency over the minds 
of men in his own way. But has the Church al- 
lowed him to do so ? Is it not clear that the dog- 
matic fences with which the Churches have been 
hedged about and protected have been restric- 
tions which have been imposed upon the Christ 
himself? They have operated to shut him out 
of the Church, because they have shut out a great 
many sincere possessors of his spirit. What a 
curious and anomalous situation, that in sur- 
rounding the Church with dogmatic barriers in 
order to protect it, the Master himself has been 
shut out. 

The Church must be reorganized upon a radi- 
cally different basis from that which for fifteen 
centuries it has recognized. Instead of a tight 
ecclesiastical fraternity erected upon a dogmatic 
foundation it must be converted into *'a brother- 
hood of a new life," into a fellowship of sym- 
pathy and of upward striving. It is perhaps 
true that many branches of the Church will not 
do this except as a last resort, since the habit of 
centuries can not easily and readily be overcome. 
There are indications from many quarters > that 
the Church will be forced eventually to take this 
attitude, and when it is taken, the hard problem 

* Prof. James Denny. 



178 A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

of Christian unity that has been confronting the 
churches for centuries will have been mastered. 
Sympathy is constructive and unifying. It 
draws the souls of men together. Sectarian di- 
visions cannot long continue when the Churches 
have become re-established upon a basis of sym- 
pathy, when they stand preeminently for broth- 
erhood and service rather than for dogma. It 
is not meant of course that Christian beliefs are 
unimportant, but that our beliefs must be put 
into character, into our deeds of kindness, into 
our devotion and service, and when that is done 
there will be no room for arguing. Our dogmas 
that cannot be expressed in these ways may well 
be left out and be regarded as unimportant. "I 
am sick of opinions," said John Wesley, "my soul 
loathes the frothy food. Give me solid substan- 
tial religion, give me a humble, gentle lover of 
God and man, a man full of mercy and good 
faith, a man laying himself out in work of faith, 
the patience of hope, the labor of love." That, 
it seems to me, is the basis upon which the Church 
of the future will stand if it stands at all. Its 
life will be found not so much in its verbal affir- 
mations, as in the atmosphere it generates, the 
institutions it develops, and the character it 
creates. 
It is not surprising that the first steps toward 



THE FELLOWSHIP OF SYMPATHY 179 

the recognition of such a principle should be hesi- 
tating and uncertain. The creed has so long held 
sway that the very thought of another basis 
seems alarming. Churches which have inherited 
complex and elaborate creeds are apt to think that 
it is in their complexity and elaborateness that 
the difficulty lies, and hence the movement in so 
many Churches that looks toward reduction and 
simplification. In fact it is not merely the sim- 
plification of the dogmatic ideal as a basis of 
Church life that is needed, but the absolute sur- 
render of it. Let it be remembered that the 
Church began without the creeds, and it has no 
more need of them now than it had in the begin- 
ning. 

Many churches have already taken a long 
stride in this direction. "They are inviting into 
their fellowship all honest believers in goodness 
and togetherness who find in the historic Jesus 
so perfect a manifestation of these principles 
that they are willing to confess him as their 
spiritual master. This is a far cry from the 
theological inquisition that used to be the test of 
Church membership, and it conserves the reli- 
gious essentials at which the doctrine-loving fore- 
fathers were aiming." Better still, it is in abso- 
lute consonance with Christ's significant parable 
of the last judgment, and it seems not unlikely 



i8o A VALID RELIGION FOR THE TIMES 

that we have reached a point where the move- 
ment in this direction will begin to spread with 
great rapidity. 

For such a Church many earnest souls are 
waiting. Good men do not stand aloof from the 
organization as it now is because it is too reli- 
gious, but because it is not religious enough. 
They see it uncertain and hesitating in its mes- 
sage, concerning itself with what seems unreal 
and paltry, weakened by its divisions and rival- 
ries, and they cannot fully respect it. Many 
who are now without the Church would greet 
with ardor a Church life that ofifered them the 
new and abiding life in Christ, that took no 
thought for itself, that dared to stand squarely 
and firmly upon the principle of Jesus, "he that 
loseth his life shall find it," and that without 
pretense or equivocation was a fellowship of 
sympathy and of upward striving. 



The End. 



MAY 4 1910 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: April 2005 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



One copy del. to Cat. Div. 



I9IC 



